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.
In 2016, when Erin Schanning lost her brother Ethan to an overdose, she was surprised to learn that there were “many evidence-based ways to treat substance use disorder that he hadn’t had access to, even though he had doggedly pursued treatment.” Now one of those treatments, buprenorphine, is about to become much more widely available.
