The reason our policies have failed is because we have not confronted a simple truth: We must care more about saving and improving the lives of people who use drugs than stopping drug use.
Residents who have experienced different waves of this crisis expressed frustration, fear, and hope about what they experienced, and what the future will bring.
I asked Dr. Lake what she wanted other doctors to know outside of Washington.
“This is going to get worse,” she told me after a long pause. “And we all have to hold each other up."
Telling a thousand strangers about my lowest point in medicine was harder, and more rewarding, than I anticipated. It also taught me about medicine’s destructive culture of shame.
When patients are at the end of their life, it is an opportunity to step back from the day-to-day accounting, to take stock of their lives, to try to let them know that they are loved, and attend to their most pressing needs. In disasters, too, we have a chance to step back, to think about what happened and how we can do better next time, to consider what would make an effective meaningful response to future tragedies.
