Covid-19 Was Tragic But Drugs Are The Rampaging Pandemic
Dear Nyaaba,
You knew only cola nuts and when you were old and weak, even that you stopped indulging in. Today’s world has many more such substances, infinitely more powerful and addictive and destructive.
In Ghana today the culprit is a tablet called “RED” which sends its host into a zombie-like trance, and when one session is over, the addict scrambles back for another fix. Such is the way many youths are spending, no, wasting their youth. And many will not make it past their youth, sadly. But it’s not a Ghana problem, it’s worldwide but rather shockingly, the world seems oblivious of it.
The world’s attention, still reeling from the devastation of COVID-19, MUST now turn to a quieter, more insidious pandemic, a crisis that kills far more slowly but with staggering regularity.
Seven million lives lost to COVID-19, they tell us, as the virus ravaged families, shattered communities, and upended entire economies. But while the world counted its dead, a far deadlier and more persistent force has continued to claim lives, an unseen epidemic that doesn’t kill in weeks, but in years. The opioid crisis.
The statistics, grim and horrifying, are piling up: more than 500,000 lives lost in the United States alone since 1999, with more than 100,000 deaths annually in recent years. These numbers, an overwhelming tide of loss, dwarf the death toll of the pandemic year after year. But this doesn’t capture the full scope of the crisis, the lives destroyed by addiction, by the shattered families, by the emotional and societal wreckage left behind.
The COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis of a moment, sweeping in and leaving a trail of bodies. But the drugs crisis is the catastrophe of a generation, an invisible, grinding devastation that destroys not just individuals but entire communities. Where COVID-19 took its toll through the rapid spread of a virus, drugs have ravaged us through the slow, suffocating spread of addiction, facilitated by a web of corporate greed, governmental negligence, and social decay. It’s a perfect storm: a flood of uber-strong prescription painkillers, and a system too weak to stop it.
How many more will we lose?
The question is less a matter of counting the dead than acknowledging the living, the millions still trapped in addiction, suffering the unbearable weight of a drug culture that no longer cares if they live or die. And it’s not just the addicts who suffer. It’s the parents who bury their children, the siblings who try desperately to pull their loved ones back from the edge, the communities torn apart by hopelessness and despair.
What will the true cost of the opioid crisis be? When will we wake up to the reality that we are not just battling a disease, but a system that profits from death, a system that continues to push the poison, a system that offers no real solution, only more destruction?
If we can truly count the toll of COVID-19, we must have the courage to count the cost of drugs, every life lost, every family fractured, every possibility snuffed out before it had the chance to flourish.
We are on track to lose not just millions more to drugs, but an entire generation. What is the difference between a pandemic that kills quickly and one that kills slowly, one that doesn’t show its face but still leaves a ruinous wake? In both cases, the dead are gone. But in the case of drugs, the living are also lost, drowning in a cycle that seems endless. There’s no end in sight.
It is time we faced the reality that the drug crisis, like COVID-19, is not just a tragedy, it is a failure of leadership, a failure of care, a failure of humanity. If we cannot reckon with this, we may lose far more than we ever could to any pandemic.
Despondently yours,
The Siriguboy
Source: Kasesi Ricky Peprah
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