20181227.0430

On 22 December 2018, the editors of the San Antonio Express-News placed "Fight against Substance Abuse Can't Wait" in the online version of the newspaper. The piece identifies one of the difficulties facing the Texas Legislature in its upcoming session: funding substance abuse treatment. It also makes the case that the challenge must be met and defeated, laying out what is reported as necessary to address mounting substance abuse issues in Texas. Figures regarding the impacts of drug abuse on the state follow, and the article closes with a call to action that it is hoped will be heard and answered by those able to do so.
The issue is one in which I am interested, to be sure. As I've noted before, my day-job is at a substance abuse treatment facility; soon enough, I will be moving into administering it. The facility receives no small amount of its funding from the state; it contracts with the Department of State Health Services and the Department of Family Protective Services to provide outpatient substance abuse treatment for people who are identified as having such problems. Changes to funding levels therefore directly affect what my facility can do and whether or not I can make a living in a line of work for which I did not train but in which I find myself. Of course I am interested in them.
And it is not only for such selfish reasons that I attend to such matters. In the job I have now, I work the front desk at the substance abuse treatment facility. When people call in looking for answers and help, I am the one who talks to them first; I am the one who hears their stories. When they come in to register for treatment, I am the one who works with them to get them through the forms. When they sit for appointments, I am the one who sees them on their ways, the one who listens to them while they wait for their counselors to help those in front of them. I am not a counselor, to be sure, but I still see and hear much of what they do; I see and hear what the illness of addiction does to people. I see them when they need help and have not yet gotten it. It is no easy thing to see, and additional support for getting people the help they need--and that others need them to get, because there are always others affected than the ones who are addicted--is therefore welcome.
I know that many will rail against such things, claiming that the people who are in such trouble got themselves into it and should get themselves out of it--or suffer and die. But they are wrong to do so. While it is true that some get themselves into trouble, they pay for it in ways I cannot describe here. And there are many who had no idea they had a problem until the moment that they began to have the problem. We see a fair number of people who didn't drink until they could by law, and when they tried, they found suddenly that they could not stop; we see many others who are offered things that they accept because their doctors tell them to, or because they are told that it will let them work just that much harder, that much longer, and then they are caught. Society as a whole suffers when people leave it in such ways, when they are barred from returning to it; it benefits from reclaiming such people as have erred and seek to atone. And it is for such reasons that the editors are once again correct; more needs to be done to ease the burden of substance abuse, and what the Legislature can do to that end, it damned well should.