I understand that people need to understand that it’s not just poor people or it’s not a class, race, color, religion.
Photos by Nema Etebar.
It really is a crisis and I do understand it is a crisis and I’ve known it’s been a crisis for a long time because I look at the news a lot and I remember years ago up in Boston where it wiped out a whole town. And I understand that people need to understand that it’s not just poor people or it’s not a class, race, color, religion. It’s an issue, period… It’s really a scary, scary crisis and I do think that we have to prioritize.
Why would I carry Narcan? It’s somebody’s kid, man. If I could get trained on how to – why wouldn’t you try to help somebody? Often times people are addicted on drugs because of some type of trauma they have in their life. It’s not because they just wanna get high and party. They had to have trauma. And that’s their way of soothing.
I used to kinda be a little hard on people with addiction – I said to myself “wow, you were judging somebody but you didn’t know what their life path was.” Then I started being more sympathetic towards people that are drug addicted or constantly incarcerated because I don’t know what happened to them when they were sober. So that made me – I always been compassionate – but that made me understand better, that while you’re judging somebody, you don’t know the path they came from, and it’s made me be more compassionate. As a community leader, I’m really into this blight that we have in Philadelphia. And it’s not because it’s a poor city. It’s because it’s Philadelphia and I’ve been in other poor cities and they don’t look like this. I never knew it was this bad.