Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

These were the last images I saw before falling asleep

They may explain the dream I just had. It was so terrifying I woke myself up.

My heart is still racing as write this

https://twitter.com/ericajsandberg/status/1405911833567891456

I was in the passenger seat of a crowded car, a politician who I knew was at the wheel (Pelosi? Breed?). She was happy and chatty, but there were bodies everywhere, some floating in water, and the road became increasingly narrow, curving, and dangerous.

“Stop the car!” I yelled

There was a man lying near the car with his dog

“Somebody help me!” I yelled, and jumped out of the car, but nobody did

I shook the man and yelled at him. “Are you okay?! Are you okay?!” I poked him once and again, harder. I checked his pulse. Nothing

His dog was dead, too, it’s eyes staring at me, accusingly

Next thing I knew I was slightly above our car, which had turned into a passenger bus.

Next to it was another passenger bus. There were many more people inside of it. Suddenly I heard women screaming.

There was movement. Something violent was inside the bus. Blood splattered across the windows. My dream had become a zombie movie

Panicked, I ran toward the bus that had been our car, screamed to open the door

It was raining now, the road was perilous, and we had to flee

“Let me drive! Let me drive!”

The woman politician at the wheel was now shaking in panic, unable to move

Everybody else in our bus was frozen in fear, the rain hammering the windows, as we just watched the beast within the neighboring bus rampage, radiating sickening sounds

I grabbed the big bus wheel now, and tried to back up, but I couldn’t, because there were bodies everywhere, and if I tried to back up from the cliff wall we were parked against, I risked running over them

But the bus next to us was now rocking back and forth as whatever was inside of it massacred everything, leaving the windows so completely covered in blood we couldn’t see inside

As the horror of the situation closed in on us, and nothing and nobody worked, I woke up

If only the fentanyl massacre that is taking place in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the rest of the country were so dramatic. Maybe then we would wake up & demand our leaders do more than give people the needles and “safe sleeping sites” with which they are killing themselves

What’s the dream and what’s the reality?

Why does it seem like the people screaming bloody murder are the only ones awake?

Why are the people who, at least until recently, described themselves as “woke,” so utterly asleep?

The word “epidemic” doesn’t describe the carnage on the streets

I visited Skid Row again two weeks ago

I was shocked that I could still be shocked after so many years poking comatose people on the sidewalk, asking in a loud voice, “Are you okay? Are you okay?!” and calling 911

There were bodies everywhere, not inside tents, not even on cardboard, on the intersection sidewalks, in gutters

We were in a group and there were simply too many people for us to poke and yell at

But there were no EMTs or police. We had no way to know whether people were dying

Would the situation be different if people were bleeding to death? Or are we so callous that we would simply get used to the blood in the same way that we have gotten used to the feces and needles? Would we just give contracts to nonprofits to clean up the blood every morning?

Is this what happens to people who live in war zones? Our friends and families flee but we stay behind, for whatever reason, growing callous as we step over bodies, watching our humanity get washed down the storm drains along with urine & feces, occasionally awoken by nightmares?

Many of the people I interviewed for my book described a kind of PTSD

“I shouldn’t have to see the kinds of things I see,” @bettersoma told me once

One homelessness researcher told me that one of his advisors encouraged him to drink to cope with the banality of drug deaths

The people who showed up to our anti-fentanyl protest were angry to the point of being unhinged. They were out of control, screaming with rage at everyone and everything, including us. “Where were you earlier?!” They demanded. “What took you so long to do anything?!”

At various moments over the last year I felt like the journalist played by Mark Ruffalo in the movie “Spotlight,” about the Boston Globe reporters who uncovered child sexual abuse by the Catholic Church

There’s a scene where he screams at his boss, played by Michael Keaton

Ruffalo wants to publish immediately, so they can stop the epidemic of child abuse, but Keaton insists they wait until they have put the whole story together. The story won’t have any impact until they can answer all the main questions, and fill in all the pieces of the puzzle

Over the last year my colleagues and I have filled in the the puzzle, and the final result is damning. There are few surprises. But put together in a single text, the picture is devastating. We answer the question of how the problem got so bad, and why it only gets worse.

I’ve published some glimpses & snippets but neither alone nor together do they properly convey the full extent of the rot that allows the situation to worsen by the day. I believe our book will help but it alone won’t be enough to change things and so we are building a coalition

Our coalition consists of people with skin in the game: parents of kids killed in the fentanyl massacre; former addicts; parents of addicts at risk of dying; neighborhood leaders as horrified by the carnage all around them as they are by the destruction of our shared humanity.

I believe that serious, sweeping reform is inevitable, and that it is only a matter of how many more of our children, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, we allow to kill themselves, before we do something

History will judge us for what’s happening, and unkindly

What’s happening is sinister and malevolent. Yes, the road to where we are now was paved with good intentions. But there are no longer any reasonable excuses for the gross inaction at all levels of government, by both political parties, and society as a whole.

At the bottom of this crisis is the repeated abdication of responsibility, individual and social. Yes, it’s understandable, and at this point I feel safe saying that few understand it as well as we do. But it remains inexcusable.

As I said at our Venice Beach protest, we demand change, and are going to get change. I have zero doubt about that. Already the progressive politicians who for years insisted that the addiction crisis is merely a housing crisis, are starting to change their tune.

They know who they are. They know that the eyes of the world are on them, and that the spotlight is getting hotter and hotter. Some still think more fancy dancing will satisfy a cynical public. But others know that they will either deliver results or be removed from office.

We will awake from this nightmare and look back on it with shame. Historians, sociologists, and psychologists will argue over how we let it get so bad before anybody did anything, and what it was that finally started to turn things around.

One day, perhaps, we will understand why the people who believed themselves most woke were the most asleep; why the most sane people in our society screamed like lunatics; and why, in the name of progress, we reverted to barbarism.

/end