Drug Addicts Are More To Be Pitied Than Censured

Broad & Liberty published my piece on drug addicts.

You can read the piece via the below link or the below text:

Paul Davis: Drug addicts are more to be pitied than censured

While recently speaking to a friend, a retired Philadelphia detective who supported President Trump in the election, he repeated something that struck a chord with me. 

The detective, a genuine tough guy who worked the streets of Kensington for a good part of his career, had taken me on a couple of “ride-alongs” through Kensington’s open-air drug market. 

“The drug addicts are lost souls due to their addiction, and although I think the police should crack down on the street-gang drug dealers, the addicts should be treated as victims,” the retired detective told me. “They are, after all, someone’s father, mother, sister, son or daughter.” 

I agreed. Damn the drug dealers, pity the drug users. I thought of the William B. Gray poem, She is More to Pitied Than Censured. 

She is more to be pitied than censured,
She is more to be helped than despised,
She is only a lassie who ventured
On life’s stormy path ill-advised.
Do not scorn her with words fierce and bitter,
Do not laugh at her shame and downfall;
For a moment just stop and consider
That a man was the cause of it all.

I also thought back to the late 1960s and early 1970’s when heroin swept through South Philly and the country like an epidemic. I saw so many young men and some young women fall victim to heroin addiction, and so many who died due to drug overdoses.  

I was no angel, and I ran with a rough teenage crew in South Philly during the ’60s. Thankfully, I joined the Navy in 1970 when I was 17. While I was serving on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War, another war was waging in my old neighborhood. And it appeared that heroin was winning the war.

When I returned home, I discovered that many of my childhood friends had become heroin junkies. It was as if they sold their soul to the drug and lost their humanity. They were mere shells of their former selves. 

I occasionally think of my late friend Steve. He was a good-looking young guy, and he was popular with the girls and the guys all liked him. He came from a well-to-do family and his father bought him a brand-new car when he graduated from high school.

Unlike many of my crowd, including me, Steve graduated from high school with good grades. He worked at his father’s South Philly store, and he always had ready cash in his pocket. Like the rest of the crowd, he drank beer and smoked pot in the late 1960s. He later took pills and graduated to heroin when I was in the Navy. 

Steve married a local girl and had a son while I was in Southeast Asia. When I came home, he told me that he was “shooting” heroin, meaning he used a needle to mainline the drug straight to his vein to achieve the maximum high. I tried to talk him out of it. 

At this point, he was not yet a full-blown junkie, and he was able to function, working in the store and living with his mother and father. He also maintained his wicked sense of humor. He asked me to help him deliver a set of drums to his ex-wife’s parent’s house, where she and his five-year-old son were living.

When we deposited the drum set, his ex-wife screamed at him and said their son was only five, so why did he buy drums? Steve handed the drumsticks to his son and the youngster began banging on the drums, much to the alarm of his ex-wife and her elderly parents. 

Steve laughed loudly in the car as we were leaving, and I must admit that I laughed as well. “I hope my son bangs on the drums day and night and drives them crazy!”

Months later, Steve became a full-blown junkie, and his father fired him and threw him out of the house after Steve stole money from the store and the house to support his growing drug addiction. His father later told me that this was the hardest thing he had ever done, and his wife, Steve’s mother, cried every night. 

The last time I saw Steve he looked like a zombie. He was thin and his face was skeletal. Yet he was wearing a fine suit. I asked him where he was going, and he replied that he was going to his lawyer’s office.

“If he doesn’t settle my case today, I’m going to throw him out the window.”

The threat must have worked, because Steve received a good settlement. I heard from his father that Steve had called his ex-wife and told her to get their son ready as he was taking him to Disneyland. She objected and said she was calling her lawyer. Steve then purchased a huge amount of heroin and overdosed in a motel room and died. His canvas bag with his cash settlement was missing. His father believed that someone gave his son a “hotshot” and killed him to get his money. We will never know. 

Steve, like so many drug addicts in those days as well as today, had their potential for a good life taken away. The drugs also robbed their families. One’s drug addiction also devastates the parents, the spouse, and their offspring.

The police need to round up the local drug pushers and stop their product from coming across the southern border from Mexico and other countries. The ready and plentiful drugs available on the street are an unstoppable lure to people like my late friend Steve and the many other drug addicts who fall victim to drug addiction. 

Drug addicts are more to be pitied than censured. 

Paul Davis, a Philadelphia writer and frequent contributor to Broad + Liberty, also contributes to Counterterrorism magazine and writes the “On Crime” column for the Washington Times. He can be reached at pauldavisoncrime.com.