Imagine this for a moment – your child is dead. This person that you have raised from birth and have focused every important thought of your life for over two decades is gone from the world forever. Because despite your efforts, your attention, and your devotion, you could not stop the fateful call of the heroin that ended your child’s life. And destroyed yours.
The deadly poison that is heroin made its way to your small town from Mexico, where it was grown and processed, later to be trafficked to your neighborhood where its target customers were someone’s children, parents, brothers and sisters.
But right now, when you open the newspaper or turn on the television, you learn that the person that brought the drugs into your neighborhood, which ultimately made their way to your child, is considered by many in both the media and the public to be a “non-violent, low-level drug offender.” In fact, the last presidential administration decided that it would treat these so-called “non-violent, low-level drug offenders” with leniency to help them avoid potentially long prison sentences required by law.
Yet it goes beyond this. Everywhere you look on the subject, you see another editorial, documentary, or pundit talking about the tragedy of the convicted “non-violent, low-level drug offender” who has been separated by his family because he is serving a long sentence in prison.
You are both hurt and confused by this. You wonder why the drug trafficker arrested and convicted for dealing over 20,000 doses of black heroin is considered a non-violent, low-level drug offender. After all, those 20,000 doses can do so much damage to a small community like yours. They can create new heroin addicts, further the dark spiral of existing heroin addicts, and take the final breath from people like your child.
And the heroin that your child used violently ripped the very life of your child away, then, with equal violence, utterly destroyed the entire purpose of your own life, turning it into a nightmare from which you can never wake up. So you are angry, and you should be, that the focus and sympathy and newspaper profile is on that of the convicted drug trafficker serving a ten-year sentence, while your child received nothing more than an obituary in your small town paper and has now been relegated to a mere statistic as one of the 52,000 overdose deaths that ravaged our country.
There is nothing that anyone will be able to do to bring your child back. However, you are heartened by the fact that this administration, like every administration before 2013, is not going to turn its back on the victims and is going to enforce the law as written, despite the mainstream media’s push to victimize the victimizers. Under President Trump and Attorney General Sessions, the Department of Justice is going to charge major drug traffickers based on the exceedingly large amounts of deadly poison they are peddling in our neighborhoods. These drug traffickers will no longer be treated with kid gloves – they will be treated like the merchants of death that they are.
Of course, that is not to say you are without sympathy for the parents who, through no fault of their own, has to see their child in prison for ten years. But more than sympathy, you are envious. Because despite their child’s disastrously wrong choices, they will be able to welcome him home one day. You will never have the same opportunity.
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