The opioid epidemic is ravaging our country, ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands across lines of class and racial differences and displacing the most vulnerable among them from their homes.
A survey conducted by the United States Conference of Mayors found that “68 percent of cities reported that substance abuse was the largest cause of homelessness for single adults.”
It is not a mass movement of apathy and addiction that is responsible for this crisis but the greed of pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers and many doctors.
Under capitalism, the role of healthcare has been perverted from its expressed purpose of providing treatment to those in need into a reckless, for-profit industry. The opioid epidemic has been manufactured by pharmaceutical companies to sell addictive drugs as a means of maximizing profits.
It is unconscionable that the executives of these companies take home millions, while the people who fall victim to their drug-peddling end up on the streets. We demonize the homeless, yet we allow the perpetrators of these white collar crimes to walk freely.
While our response to homelessness has become increasingly punitive – by putting spikes on window sills and dividers on benches to push the homeless out of sight and often into prisons – we need to recognize the material conditions that drive homelessness. We must also identify who the real criminals are: the bourgeois class who profit off the destruction of people’s lives.
Homelessness is not the result of the personal choices of the homeless, as it has been framed for decades, but of the systems of power that facilitate poverty. Framing it as the individual failures of poor people is a way for corporations, and the affluent class at their helm, to shirk responsibility for structuring society in a way that requires mass exploitation.
To solve the massive problems of homelessness and the opioid epidemic, we must stop our victim-blaming and hold the real perpetrators of these injustices accountable.
