I’m a junkie – recovered now for 14 years, but a junkie just the same. A high-school dropout and chronic runaway, I spent my later teenage years shooting black tar heroin and smuggling drugs across the Mexican border – mostly ketamine and OxyContin, the latter of which I also shot. Back then I was a loser, a washout, a petty narcotrafficker, a statistical blip in the opioid epidemic.
But today I’m also a doctor (of the illegitimate variety, mind you). Clean at 19, I spent my later twenties at Yale University earning a PhD, which I completed last spring. There I was a scholar, a student, a teacher,a valued member of an exclusive intellectual community.
Being a junkie in the Ivy League doesn’t guarantee success, but it does guarantee perspective. I learned a lot about America’s upper crust, and I saw much that my colleagues never could. But only last week, during a visit to my alma mater, did I begin to understand the role that Yale played in my own addiction.
Spring having arrived, I visited Yale, which wears the season well. I wandered the campus before entering Dwight Chapel, which stands in the heart of Old Campus and hosts a small morning AA meeting. I used to attend that meeting quite regularly, although I remember our fellowship being mostly indigents from the nearby New Haven Green and kids from local rehabs. I remember two things: we were opioid addicts, and we were invisible to the Yale community – ignored, really, like unwelcome pests.
And it was then, sitting alone in that musty chapel, when it hit me: to my left stood the Skull and Bones crypt , the secret windowless clubhouse for the country’s most exclusive private society, whose founder’s extended family had become the largest American merchants in the Indo-Chinese opium trade. And beyond the crypt stood Yale’s medical campus, which has received major gifts from the Sackler family, whose wealth comes largely from owning Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin. Purdue Pharma criminally misbranded that drug to make it appear harmless. The company pleaded guilty in 2007 and agreed to pay around $600m in fines.
But behind me, I also realized, beyond the Old Campus quad filled with elite Yale undergrads (one of whom, I’ll never forget, once wore a $70,000 Patek Phillippe wristwatch to my class), stood the New Haven Green. Many times while crossing the Green I was offered heroin and OxyContin, and more than once I saw EMTs attempting to revive an addict with naloxone. What’s more, across the street stands New Haven City Hall, where last October the city formally sued Purdue Pharma for their brazen behavior and illegal practices.
The irony would be comical if it were not so lethal: I once violated federal laws to smuggle a drug across an international border that was manufactured by a company whose malfeasance simultaneously exacerbated my own addiction and, through the personal donations by the owners of Purdue, enriched a university that would later grant me a PhD.
While Oxycontin had almost killed me, it had also helped build Yale’s vaunted Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute for Biological, Physical and Engineering Sciences. So had every opioid addict in my little chapel meeting – so had every dope fiend in America.
I’ve learned much about this country’s powerful and elite, but I have no interest in scolding them. People and places like Yale will never change. I’d rather address my junkie brothers and sisters, and everyone else that this epidemic has touched:
Listen, friends, I have a dual identity, and I have for most of my life. I’m an addict kid and a suburban child, an Ivy-League insider and a dope–shooting outsider, a deplorable and a doctor. I’ve learned first–hand how little regard the wealthy, corporate and institutional worlds have for us, even supposed liberal bastions like Yale. I’ve learned that while we have the privilege of perspective, they have the perspective of privilege. And I’ve learned something else: they are wrong about us. We are not worthless, or weak.
Dear brothers and sisters, believe me when I tell you that you are no less special or brilliant or talented or ambitious than the Yale students I once knew and taught.
Believe me when I tell you that you are not deplorables, that you are assets to this country, that your will and resolve to hustle and survive make you uniquely equipped for the contemporary world. Believe me when I tell you that you are wanted, and useful, and important and deserve to thrive. Believe me when I tell you that I love you, and so do so many others, and that you should never, ever give up.