In the corporate world, there are two ways to view problems: from “the weeds”, and from 50,000 feet.
Here are two views of one problem:
The View from The Weeds
Around 2002 my mom, while living with my brother and I after her divorce from my dad, started to use OxyContin with a friend of hers from work. She became instantly addicted to the drug sometimes called “hillbilly heroin”.
One night I went out with a girl named Rachel. After dinner Rachel and I came back to my apartment to watch The Lord of the Rings. When we arrived back at the apartment my mom came out of her room, in just a t-shirt, with a fistful of coins.
She began throwing those coins at Rachel, shouting in a slurred voice that Rachel had never loved her, before she passed out on the couch.
What my mom said was technically true. Rachel didn’t love my mom, because up until that moment, they had never met.
There was no second date. Rachel did a hard left swipe on 21-year old Dustin and his quarter-throwing mother.
A few years later I met and married my wife. About a year later my dad became addicted to crystal meth after trying the drug with a friend. (From a public-health crisis perspective, crystal meth was heroin before heroin was heroin.)
His addiction lasted 5 long years.
After not hearing from my dad for several months, my wife and I went to check on him. We wanted to make sure he was okay and eating enough food. I found him in his kitchen, with a loaded shotgun, ready to kill the (imaginary) white-robed men in the trees he believed had been following him.
We didn’t know his addiction had progressed to the point where we were in physical danger. My wife took our son and hid behind the wall in another room, while my dad gestured wildly with a loaded shotgun, occasionally pointing the gun at me.
We made it out of that night alive, and my dad made it out of his addiction alive.
My mom, however, never completely recovered. She passed away from heart failure at age 56.
That’s one small snippet from the “the weeds” of my parent’s drug addiction.
The View from 50,000 Feet
My parents were members of a loosely defined but—especially in 2016—often discussed segment of the population: the American white working class.
Despite the fact that we experienced severe economic struggles in my early childhood, my family had become upwardly mobile. My mom got a job as a paralegal in the early 90’s, and my dad worked his way into a managerial role at a conveyor belt manufacturer.
Then in the era of globalization, my dad lost his job. My parents got divorced, their house was foreclosed on, and both sank into an abyss of addiction from which neither of them ever quite recovered.
In other words, from 50,000 feet: The McKissens, a formerly upwardly mobile white working class family, lost it all in the era of free trade, and as a result had nowhere to turn but a pill bottle and a glass pipe.
A Simple Story for a Complex Problem
It took roughly 500 words, in this post, to tell a very small part of the “in the weeds” view of my parents and their struggles. It took roughly 100 words to tell the 50,000-foot view of my parents and their white working class plight.
And the 50,000-foot view is how we tend to talk about the heroin and opiod crisis in America.
The stories often go something like this: communities and individuals everywhere are being ravaged by the heroin crisis. Why, the stories always ask? The conclusion is almost always the loss of manufacturing jobs among the white working class.
And there are places where that is true.
In West Virginia, where manufacturing job loss has been significant, the death rate from drug overdose is higher than the national average.
However, the narrative that places the entire blame for the heroin epidemic at the feet of globalization, free trade, and manufacturing job loss is too simple.
My parents, for example, only fit that narrative at the 50,000-foot level. They were white. They were working class. They lost what they had earned in the era of globalization. They turned to drugs.
However, when viewed closer, the reality is that their own bad decisions intersected with the widespread availability of their drugs of choice. Further, my dad was never outsourced. He just couldn’t get along with his boss. However, he is quick to identify with a narrative that gives a reason—other than his own problems with authority—for what happened to him.
And at a macro-level, if drug epidemics where simply the result of job loss, it would be hard to explain the 125% increase in overdose deaths in North Dakota in 2013-2014, which at the time was in the midst of an economic boom.
The simple narrative of “globalization and free trade = manufacturing job loss = drug crisis” absolves people like my parents from their own bad choices and prevents a discussion of other contributing factors, like:
· the political influence of drug companies on both sides of the aisle;
· politicians and media that promote a vision of the future so bleak and rooted in such powerlessness that self-medicating might be a reasonable response.
My parents used to be contributors. They played important roles in thriving businesses. They owned a home. They paid taxes.
They were a pretty good mom and dad.
All of that disappeared.
The world experiences a loss everytime that happens. And it’s happening a lot.
So maybe it’s time to take a deeper look at the real story behind the simple narrative.
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