As opioid addicts get empathy, so should others

It’s great that Joy Fanguy is getting her life back.

Fanguy, who is now 31, recently told the USA Today Network - Tennessee about how she spent most of her 20s fighting an addiction to prescription painkillers that she developed as a teenager. She, as well as many others, are the face of the state’s opioid epidemic.

It’s an epidemic that killed 1,451 people in 2015. Adding to that is the fact that 5 percent of Tennesseans are addicted to opiates, and that the state is second per capita when it comes to opioid prescriptions, and that is, in and of itself, a prescription for future tragedy.

Yet, as attention is being increasingly focused on salvaging white people such as Fanguy from the scourge of opioid addiction through treatment and empathy, it’s past time for that same empathy to be extended to AfricanAmericans who continue to face the scourge of draconian sentencing and disproportionate arrests for using or possessing crack cocaine.

While black people comprise 14 percent of drug users, they make up 37 percent of those who are arrested. African-Americans serve almost as much time in federal prison for drug offenses as whites serve for violent offenses.

That’s mostly because crack cocaine use in black communities hasn’t been met with an urge to help as much as it has been met with an urge to punish.

The prison population has skyrocketed since the 1980s because of law enforcement’s focus on the drug trade in poor, urban areas.

In those communities, family stress has increased, as well as the instability that goes along with people cycling in and out of prison. It has also distorted ideas of normalcy to the point where many young, African-Americans see prison as an inevitability when they should see it as an aberration.

“I’ve seen drug mules sentenced to 10 years, and a guy sentenced to eight to 10 years for a hand-to-hand transaction,” said Norm Pattis, a Connecticut-based criminal and civil rights lawyer that USA Today has referred to as “America’s fiercest trial lawyer.”

“In an urban area, these are crimes of opportunity for people who don’t have other opportunities…” But here’s the thing. Although the differing approaches to the opioid epidemic and the crack epidemic reflect how some lives are valued over others, it still shines a light on the unequal treatment — and by doing so, gives more standing for AfricanAmerican communities to demand that it be fixed.

“I think it’s encouraging to see it (drug addiction) being treated as an illness,” Pattis said. “Pain comes in many forms, forms like despair and anxiety, and there’s no question in my mind that like opioid addicts, many crack addicts are self-medicating…

“…But I don’t hear people talking about crack addiction in the same way that they are talking about opioid addiction, and that needs to change.”

Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, said progress has been made on the federal level when it comes to halting disparate sentencing for crack possession versus cocaine possession. But, he said, while Tennessee lawmakers are taking some small steps toward lessening penalties for possessing small amounts of marijuana, a lot of work remains.

“Real reconciliation has to come from the states, and unfortunately, in states like Tennessee, it’s going to come very slowly,” Spickler said.

No doubt, people struggling with opioid addiction deserve for their problem to be viewed as a health issue first. Yet, as Pattis said, many people who are using crack are, like opioid users, also using it to deal with pain and issues in their lives.

With that in mind, lawmakers — at the federal and state levels — should continue to look at how to help black and white people who have been impacted by drugs to get their lives, and the lives of their communities, back.

“(The drug problem) is a public health issue, and it always has been,” Spickler said. “Addiction doesn’t discriminate.”

It’s about time that the law, and our capacity to empathize, didn’t either.