The eCrozier

Reading Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy isn’t a fun read, but it’s probably the most comprehensive, data-driven, human-focused source one could find to understand our country’s opioid crisis. Macy covers the waterfront, from the 1990s when oxycontin hit the market as a “researched, non-addictive solution” for people’s chronic pain to today’s reality of it being a highly-addictive drug that has destroyed families and communities. With all the racial, class, and political divisions present in our country, opioid addiction is the one thing we have in common across them, not in our empathy and desire to address it honestly and effectively, but in that no part of our divided country has missed suffering from it.

I’ll leave it to public health and addiction experts to explain (and hopefully, convince us) how to address this deepening crisis (hint: it’s going to cost lots of money). I’m more qualified to reflect on theology and human nature, which is actually needed in this case, since bad theology and an ignorant view of human nature is part of the problem. Simply put, too many who control the public and private funds needed to address the crisis still believe the problem is a moral one, where the victims of this aren’t truly victims, but moral laggards with weak wills. They mistakenly believe that, if “those people” just showed some willpower, then they’d be able to either avoid addiction all together or will their way to sobriety. This “theology” (and it is a theology) is the problem, because it’s not based in either traditional Christian theology or what science tell us about addiction.

The Church’s theology has told us for centuries that all humanity is sinful; that we lack the willpower, in and of ourselves, to avoid sin. We have a collect in our tradition that tells us that “we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves.” Truer words were never written. Thus, we’re literally “bound” to sin. We don’t have complete “free will.” Sin working in us will always distort our freedom as well as our ability to regularly choose what’s good for us. So, theologically, the claim that people can just will their way to beat addiction is false. God’s mercy is the only power that can help us. And God’s power comes, not from inside of us, but from the grace imputed to us in Jesus.

Science also understands addiction as not a moral failure, but as a biological fact. When people are physically addicted to something as powerful as an opioid, they can’t just stop without significant time, support, and treatment. Now, there will always be outliers, people who one day went “cold turkey” all by themselves. But those are highly exceptional cases and are probably due to the particular person’s unusual biochemistry and context. We can wish people had the willpower but wishing won’t make them have it. And we can’t make effective national policy decisions based on a few outliers.

We won’t solve the opioid crisis until a critical mass of those in control of public and private funds change their bad theology and flawed understanding of human biology. It’s their ignorance, and the bad theology undergirding it, that’s allowing the crisis to worsen. We won’t end this crisis by moralizing over people’s failures. Only when we admit the reality of our human condition, will we move toward an effective policy.

+Scott