DRUGS ARE NOT THE ONLY WAY A PERSON CAN GET HIGH

In the late 1970s, Louise was a bit of a party girl - not wild, but
definitely social.

She drank a little, smoked some weed, snorted some cocaine and enjoyed
her life.

When she married and became pregnant, she wanted to behave
responsibly, especially for the sake of the child.

So she stopped doing drugs, and only drank the occasional glass of
wine. All seemed to be well.

Then, in about 1990, Louise was having some health
problems.

Tests revealed that she had a form of liver disease that was called,
at the time, "non-A non-B hepatitis." Now, that liver disease is known
as hepatitis C.

In our city, there has been a great deal of talk about the use of
illegal drugs, and the treatment of those who are addicted.

The anxiety-provoked discussions about where to build the "wet"
housing facility, for example, have only been useful in that it has
brought to peoples' attention this very complex problem of drug addiction.

The complexities include, but are not limited to, why people become
"users," the increase of homelessness, crime rates, health care,
crowding in the emergency ward at KGH, and who pays for long term drug
treatments for people with HIV/AIDS or hep C. There is no one magic
bullet.

We can be very judgmental about the behaviour of people who use
socially unacceptable (i.e. illegal) means to numb themselves or to
get high.

And yet lots of people zone out, temporarily escape their lives,
through the use of more socially accepted drugs, and those people are
not judged nearly as harshly.

The costs to our collective health, and the spin-offs into the
well-being of families, are also very great when it comes to over-use
of alcohol or tobacco.

But these are more permissible.

People use drugs (legal and illegal) for a lot of reasons.

Sometimes, it's a way of dealing with what seems to be a pretty
painful life situation.

Ideally, a person should look for alternative ways of living with that
situation, ways of getting "high" more naturally or ways of filling
the emptiness with something more healthful than simply avoidance.

There are, for example, spiritual practices that can help us to do
this--meditation, yoga, prayer, running, breath-work, and more--it's a
long list.

But that's ideal. None of us is perfect, and some of us need more
support than others to find the healthy alternatives and stick to
them. Louise doesn't exactly know how she acquired hep-C. It could
have been from sharing coke straws.

She does remember having a sort of flu back in those days, that stayed
for a few weeks and then went away. Or it could have been when she had
that tattoo put on her arm--maybe the needles or the ink were not
clean and new.

Whatever it was, she is now, 20-some years later, having to deal with
a chronically under-functioning liver, daily medications, and an
uncertain future.

Who knew, back then, how easily one could receive the hep C virus from
an unsuspected source?

Louise is unlucky that she had that one important misfortune in her
younger days. She is lucky that she can afford to pay for appropriate
treatment, and that she has a supportive family around her. Not
everyone is so blessed.

This is hepatitis C awareness month. Its lessons include the
instruction to become informed about the disease and how it is
transmitted; the encouragement to find healthy ways of filling the
difficult spaces in our lives; and the reminder to have compassion for
our fellow human beings.