We know how to grieve the dead.
We light candles. We write obituaries. We gather in churches and tell each other that they are at peace now, that the suffering is over. There is a shape to mourning, a beginning and an end, and the grief, however brutal, eventually finds somewhere to rest.
Most stories about drugs are stories about the dead. The overdose. The empty bedroom. The phone call at three in the morning. We have learned to tell those stories because they have an ending, and endings, even terrible ones, can be borne.
This is not one of those stories. This is about the living.
Because here is the thing no one tells you. Sometimes the living are harder to carry than the dead. The dead stop falling. The living keep falling, year after year, and the people who love them stand at the bottom of the well with their arms open, waiting to catch a body that never quite lands and never quite climbs out.
Let me tell you about a few of them.
Nick
Nick came from a large German family, the kind with long tables and louder Christmases. A happy childhood. A boy who was good with people and impatient to build things, who started a business young and made it work. Success came early, and it came easily.
Then came the first addiction. Alcohol. It took everything. The business, the money, the future he had sketched for himself. And then, against the odds, he did the hardest thing a person can do. He got sober. He stayed sober. He married a wonderful woman. They had two children. For fifteen years he was rock solid, a husband and a father and a man who had walked through fire and come out clean on the other side. He built a second business. It soared.
Then came cocaine. And after the cocaine, other things.
When Covid arrived, it pulled the rug out from under him, and the man who had survived once did not survive twice. The business collapsed. The marriage ended. He slept on his brother’s couch, and then he did not even have that. Today he is a penniless drifter somewhere in Europe, a man who occasionally appears at family occasions like weather, unannounced, and leaves everyone shaken. He has, in the chemical sense, forgotten his own children. His family lives in a low and permanent dread, the kind that hums under every ordinary day, half expecting the call they have spent years bracing for.
Clara
Clara is twenty-seven and brilliant. She grew up in a loving, affluent European home, the kind of childhood that is supposed to be a fortress. She fell in with the wrong crowd as a young adult, the way bright and restless people sometimes do. She ended up in an abusive relationship with a much older woman who used heroin, and Clara, who had so much in front of her, walked into the same trap. Later came meth. Then ketamine.
Now she sends her parents messages that no parent should ever have to read, messages that say she does not want to be alive. They tried everything a family can try. They gave her a flat. They paid for private rehab. They loved her loudly and without conditions. None of it worked, because you cannot love a person out of addiction. She is wanted by the police now, for taking money from a pensioner. There is no end in sight, only the intermittent contact, the silence between the messages, and the waiting.
Gabe
Gabe is from Ireland, in his early thirties, and he was a soft and sensitive boy, the gentlest in a gentle family. A gifted artist. Good at school. Gay, in a home that loved him. At eighteen he fell into the chemsex world, and it swallowed him whole. He dropped out. He drifted to the streets of London, where he sold his body to pay for the habit that was eating him from the inside. He caught HIV. He has been in trouble with the police, including for violence against the people closest to him.
He was going to be an artist. He had the eye for it, the soul for it. The drugs took the artist and left the appetite.
You Cannot Love Someone Sober
I could tell you story after story. I know too many. So does almost everyone, if they are honest, because addiction does not respect postcodes or pedigrees or the size of the inheritance. It moves through good families and bad ones with the same patient hunger.
And every one of these stories teaches the same merciless lesson. Love is not a key that fits the lock. Neither is money. Neither is the flat, the rehab, the lawyer, the second chance, the tenth chance. Addiction is not a failure of willpower that the right amount of devotion can repair. It rewires the architecture of a person’s reward and motivation systems, so that the drug stops being a choice and starts being the operating system. The mother who has not slept in three years did not love her child too little. The father who remortgaged the house to pay for treatment did not try too softly.
That is the particular cruelty of it. The families do everything right and the disease does not care. They become experts in a war they cannot win by fighting harder, and they learn, slowly and against every instinct, that they cannot save the person they would die for.
Why I Stand Behind the War on Drugs
I have many libertarian instincts. I believe deeply that the state should stay out of most of a free man’s business, that adults should be left to make their own choices and live with them.
And yet on this, I stand firmly behind the war on drugs.
I know the objection. I have heard it a hundred times, and there is real force in it. The war on drugs has not worked the way we wanted. Prohibition has not emptied the streets of poison. The cartels are rich and the addicts keep coming. I am not naive about any of that.
But I do not think the question is only whether a policy is maximally efficient. Some things a society does not because they are guaranteed to succeed, but because they are right, and because refusing to do them says something corrosive about who we have become. The law is not only a tool. It is a teacher. When the state, acting as the moral authority of a whole people, declares that we will not tolerate the substances that are hollowing out our young and breaking our families, it draws a line that means something even when the line is crossed.
Surrender teaches too. When a government shrugs and decriminalizes and looks away, it tells the eighteen-year-old at the edge of the chemsex party, the bright girl at the threshold of the wrong relationship, that the grown-ups have stopped believing this is worth fighting. It removes the last guardrail, which is the simple, stubborn social signal that this path leads somewhere we will not follow you. We owe the young that signal. We owe them the strongest statement we are capable of making, and we owe it to them even on the days when the fight feels hopeless, because the alternative is to confirm to a generation that we gave up on them.
Duterte, Bukele, and the Cost of Not Being Paralyzed
This is why I feel a genuine, complicated sympathy for what Rodrigo Duterte did in the Philippines and what Nayib Bukele has done in El Salvador.
Let me be precise, because precision matters here. I do not condone the killing of innocents. I never will. Duterte’s campaign killed thousands, many of them poor, many of them without a trial, some of them almost certainly guilty of nothing. He now sits in a detention cell in The Hague, where the International Criminal Court has confirmed charges of crimes against humanity and sent his case toward trial. That reckoning is not an accident. Blood was spilled that should never have been spilled, and a society that cares about justice cannot wave it away.
But I will not pretend I do not understand the impulse behind it, and I will not pretend the results are nothing. Look at El Salvador. For years it was the murder capital of the world, a country where gangs ruled neighborhoods like occupying armies. Under Bukele’s state of exception, with all its harshness and all its documented abuses, the homicide rate has collapsed by more than 98 percent, from over a hundred murders per hundred thousand a decade ago to barely more than one. Mothers walk their children to school in places that were killing fields. The cost has been real, with tens of thousands detained and serious questions about due process and lives lost in custody. It is not clean. It is not simple. I would not paste it onto a free Western nation. But a leader looked at hell and refused to be paralyzed by it.
And paralysis is the disease of most governments. They convene the panel. They commission the study. They issue the statement of concern. And meanwhile Nick disappears, and Clara sends another message in the dark, and Gabe sells himself on a London street, and the families wait. There is a moral cowardice in endless deliberation that dresses itself up as prudence. The intention to fight is not nothing. A society that has lost even the will to try has lost something it will not easily recover. The hard task, the genuinely hard task, is to keep the will to fight without losing the soul that makes the fight worth winning.
If Your Family Is Breaking
If your family has been torn apart by this, then I want you to hear me directly.
You have my deepest sympathy, and you are in my prayers. You did not fail. You are not carrying this because you loved wrongly or tried too little. You are carrying it because you loved someone the disease wanted more than they could refuse.
Have faith. Miracles are possible. Recovery happens. I have watched it happen to people everyone had written off, people further gone than the ones I have described here. The door that looks bolted shut does sometimes open. Keep your own light on. Keep your own life intact, because you cannot pour from an empty vessel, and the person you love will need you to still be standing if the day ever comes that they reach for your hand.
A Word to Government and to the Church
And if you serve in government, or if you serve the Church, then I ask one thing of you above all.
Charity toward the afflicted must never become tolerance of the affliction.
These are not the same mercy, and confusing them is how good people end up doing harm. The addict is a sick soul to be met with compassion, with patience, with open arms and an open door, again and again, however many times they fall. That is the heart of the Gospel and I will defend it against anyone. But the dealer, the trafficker, the merchant who grows fat on Clara’s despair and Gabe’s ruin, is not a patient to be coddled. He is a predator to be stopped.
Mercy for the sick. Firmness against the merchant. A society that cannot hold both of those at once will collapse into one of two failures: it will become cruel to the suffering, or it will surrender to the trade that creates the suffering. We must refuse both. We feed the hungry and we sit with the broken and we never, not once, stop saying with the full moral weight of the community that the poison itself will not be permitted to flow freely through our streets and into our children.
The dead are at peace. The living are still falling. We owe it to both, and to the families standing at the bottom of the well with their arms open, to keep fighting like it matters.
Because it does.
If you or someone you love is struggling with thoughts of suicide, please reach out. In the US, call or text 988. In the UK and Ireland, the Samaritans are reachable free at 116 123. Wherever you are, your local emergency services and crisis lines are there for exactly this. You are not alone, and the next chapter is not yet written.
