Thank you.
I've been working, for over eight years now, to try to mitigate stigma. It's a very uphill battle. The narrative has to change among so many of us, and we just aren't there yet. We use stigmatizing language. We put people down, particularly people who use drugs. People use drugs for a variety of reasons. My daughter started using drugs to cope with the loss of her grandmother and the potential loss of her dad. He died 18 months after she did. It's been very difficult, and it's a cause very dear to my heart.
I don't know what the answer is to that, but it has to start pretty much at the upper levels. Words like “addict” are very derogatory. Using words like “clean” doesn't do anything. It implies that people using drugs are dirty. We need to move forward and change some of the narrative, and some of the derogatory and stigmatizing words we use. There has to be a national educational piece to try to change that. It's very difficult, because it's been ingrained in so many of us for so many years. The war on drugs created that. It's upward of 50 years now that we've been dealing with some of this stigma.
Unfortunately, I don't really see that changing any time soon, unless we, as people, make those changes ourselves.