Though ostensibly compassionate, when we lower our expectations for people suffering from addiction we fail to recognize their human dignity.
Homeless encampment in Los Angeles, California. (Credit: Matt Gush via Canva)
Audrey Bae
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
There is a phrase that has become increasingly common when discussing drug addiction and homelessness: “meet people where they are.”
There is a compassionate impulse behind it. Harm-reduction programs, in particular, are responding to a current and brutal reality: people are using drugs, and withholding care does not necessarily mean they will stop. In fact, they may be more likely to die.
But meeting someone where they are at should not mean leaving them there.
Our response to drug addiction increasingly seems organized around the idea of immediately mitigating the harms of drug use without setting sobriety as the ultimate goal. In our hesitation to demand change from people who may not be ready for it, we have grown hesitant to make a moral judgment about addiction itself.
It has become surprisingly contentious to say the simple truth: sobriety is good.
As a student, I fully acknowledge that I do not have the expertise to lay down policy action items. Instead, I wish to examine the question that comes before all of these policy debates: What should we, as fellow neighbors, want from someone suffering from severe drug addiction?
While keeping someone alive is necessary, it should not be our only goal.
In conversations concerning drug addiction, an emphasis on autonomy is necessary. Human dignity is inseparable from the ability to make our own decisions. We should protect this ability and be cautious of entrusting it to outside entities. But drug addiction complicates this connection between choice and autonomy.
Autonomy means more than satisfying immediate desires; it requires reflection, restraint, and the ability to plan for a future. Addiction can undermine these faculties while reorganizing a person’s priorities around satisfying an increasingly overwhelming need.
Addiction is also tremendously alienating. It can estrange people from their families, communities, workplaces, and even themselves. Loved ones may desperately wish to intervene while being completely unequipped to manage overdose, relapse, or other behaviors that accompany addiction. Such relationships collapse under exhaustion, broken trust, and even violence.
For people living on the streets, impairment carries even greater dangers. There is no physical separation from vehicles, weather, or human traffickers. Addiction compounds existing threats and renders them both physically and mentally defenseless in extreme situations.
Sobriety does not by itself give someone dignity, but it can restore the faculties necessary to exercise their dignity: judgment, reflection, memory, responsibility, restraint, and long-term planning. Well-intentioned liberals misunderstand that to oppose drug addiction is not to condemn the person suffering from it. In fact, it is quite the opposite. We should oppose addiction because we believe that the person is capable of and deserving of more than mere survival, that they have a future worth living fully.
Part of our difficulty advocating unapologetically for sobriety may lie in how we have come to understand compassion. We are increasingly uncomfortable with discomfort. We have also grown suspicious, sometimes for good reason, of institutions or people that impose suffering while claiming it to be for someone else’s benefit. As a result, our language emphasizes accommodation: reduce harm, remain nonjudgmental, and “meet people where they are.”
But the elimination of discomfort cannot be the ultimate objective of compassion. Physical rehabilitation is difficult. Reconciliation requires confronting our and others’ wrongdoings. This does not make suffering intrinsically good, but it distinguishes between suffering that destroys and discomfort that rebuilds.
Whether it is surrendering their sole source of relief or enduring the pangs of withdrawal, sobriety asks something incredibly difficult of an addicted person. Yet our reluctance to ask another person to endure discomfort can itself become a failure of compassion.
There is a subtle paternalism in expecting too little from people, too. If sobriety seems so difficult that we become uncomfortable even articulating it as the ideal, we risk communicating something bleak: safer substance use may be the most we can reasonably hope for you.
And this creates a disturbing problem for a culture increasingly hesitant to prescribe any particular idea of “the good life.” America embraces pluralism in countless areas of life: religion, career, sexuality, wealth, and so on. Tolerance requires leaving room for those differences and accepting some level of disagreement.
But pluralism should not require us to surrender every judgment about living well. We believe that health is better than preventable illness, community is better than isolation, and life is better than death. We should likewise believe that freedom in sobriety is better than bondage to addiction.
A society that truly believes in the dignity of people suffering from addiction should want for more than a safer way to remain addicted.