Of all the things that make me wish I were smarter, being able to do something with public policy about heroin addiction is very near the top of the list.

I grew up in the nineties and my set of friends and I were all self-medicating our way through our teenage angst and emotional problems to some degree or another. It seems like almost overnight heroin showed up in our scene, not because anyone was addicted to opiate pain medication, but just because someone's dealer got some, exactly like this article describes.

Within just a couple of years, the collection of friends had an enormous rift right down the middle: half had tried and become addicted to heroin, and the other half of us felt like we had no choice but to get out of the scene and get our shit together.

To this day, I have no idea what factors other than chance put someone in the former group vs. the latter. Those of us that went into the latter group weren't any smarter and we didn't have better support networks. Of the dozen or so people in the former, maybe only 2-3 came out of it successful in the long-term. Everyone else is either dead, in jail, or living as addicts. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this to no effect.

Becoming a heroin addict isn't something I would wish on my worst enemy. It's the most awful thing to see someone you love go through that I can think of. Treating it as a criminal matter instead of a public health matter is absolutely the worst possible way to deal with it.