This article appeared recently in Yahoo Life:
When a person dies of an overdose, everyone wants someone to blame. If only it were so simple.
Recent celebrity overdose deaths have revived familiar questions about responsibility, but experts say addiction rarely has one simple cause.
Truer words. In the most recent examples, those who were apportioned blame include celebrity parents, the world of international modeling, and alternative addiction therapies (specifically, psychedelic-assisted).
Of course, there were also the inevitable conspiracy theories, centered on figuring out who had provided the drugs to the victim in the first place.
According to NIDA Director Nora Volkow, it’s “… a very human thing, that we try to identify the cause of something that is consequential.” And for many of the bereaved, that means treating the overdose fatality first and foremost as a crime, complete with villain and victim, accompanied by an intense desire for justice.
That includes hunting down a perpetrator on whom to inflict the severest of punishments.
All easy enough to understand. But in practice, once faced with the circumstances, things can get murky. After all, the victim may well have self-administered the fatal dose, or even procured it on their own — thereby exercising what at least appears to most observers to be freedom of choice.
And in most instances, it’s likely that no one involved intended for anyone to die. The seller’s goal was simply to make a buck, and the user was only trying to get high, something they had done hundreds or even thousands of times previously. It gives the whole incident the aura of an awful accident.
Which leaves plenty of room for a criminal defense attorney to muddy the waters in front of a jury.
Also, family members and others around the victim may struggle with their own feelings of responsibility, for things they themselves may have done or said, as well as for other things they didn’t say or do that, in hindsight, might’ve made a difference in preventing the tragic outcome.
It’s possible to drive oneself batty with “what ifs”, without ever arriving at a satisfactory answer.
No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s all too human.
