“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the…streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.”
That’s the opening line of Howl by Allen Ginsberg, one of the most powerful passages about addiction and despair in modern poetry.
Although it was written in 1956, its message still resonates today as our society is ravaged by drugs unheard of in Ginsberg’s time: poisons like fentanyl, tranq, and kratom, an opioid-like substance that’s readily available at gas stations and shops across Suffolk.
This week’s South Shore Press features stories about the drug epidemic: one man’s battle against kratom addiction and an effort by Legislator Jim Mazzarella to ban it.
Although it’s a natural substance—so are heroin and cocaine—kratom has devastating effects on those who take it. You feel good, but it doesn’t last, and soon you need more and more. It’s not regulated, so you don’t know what you’re getting, especially in pill form. Withdrawal is horrible and, as one user explained, “It re-wires your body and your brain so you really never get over it.”
The world is awash in drugs, and they are easy to get. As a friend put it, “If I could have gotten kratom from a gas station when I was a teen, I definitely would have been hooked.” That is currently the case with cannabis—it’s now legal and much more potent than in Ginsberg’s Beatnik days.
Recent drug seizures made by law enforcement are stunning. In September, a Holbrook couple was arrested with nearly $2 million in methamphetamines, cocaine, fentanyl, and other drugs, one of the largest busts in Suffolk history, according to District Attorney Ray Tierney, who has made fighting the drug scourge the cornerstone of his tenure.
More than 50 boats attempting to smuggle drugs into the country have been blown up under President Trump’s Operation Southern Spear, and last year alone, more than 47 million fentanyl-laced counterfeit pills and nearly five tons of powder were seized nationwide, enough to kill more than 369 million people.
God knows how much is still getting through, but one thing is certain: everyone knows a story about how drugs have destroyed a life.