By Tommy Acosta
Sedona, AZ — If there’s one thing nearly every living organism on this planet shares, it is the ability to feel pain.
The pain of hunger. Of loneliness. Of illness. The pain of broken bones and broken bodies, broken hearts and broken homes. The pain of poverty, depression, the death of someone we love—and, eventually, the anticipation of our own death. Pain, in all its shapes and forms, is the one certainty life gives us all. No one escapes it.
Naturally, then, we seek to avoid it—by any means necessary.
We take shelter in distractions and pleasures of every kind. The pleasures of the flesh, the pleasures of the mind. We chase success, make love, buy toys, create art, indulge in delicious food, bury ourselves in television, scroll endlessly through our handheld devices, dive into games, fantasies, stories. Anything to keep our attention away from the gnawing thing inside us. Anything to stave off the ache. Anything to feel… happy.
But there’s one method of pain relief that surpasses all others in its ruthless efficiency—drugs. With alcohol following closely behind.
Simply put, drugs kill pain. Whether they’re legal or illegal, prescribed or purchased in a back alley—they silence the cries of our suffering, even if only for a while.
And so, we find ourselves staring down the barrel of a global drug crisis. A black market worth hundreds of billions, feeding a human need as ancient as suffering itself. Every user—whether a suburban teenager experimenting at a party, or a man sleeping in the shadows of a city he no longer recognizes—uses for the same reason: to escape. To dull the pain of existence, to lift themselves, however briefly, out of the mundane or the unbearable.
And at the top of this dark hierarchy of painkillers is fentanyl.
It is the king.
When all else fails—when the prescriptions stop working, when the cancer spreads too far, when the body becomes a battlefield—fentanyl is the final answer. It is cheap. It is powerful. It works.
And the drug companies profit greatly from this.
And on the streets, it is cherished. For those drowning in emotional torment, trauma, poverty, neglect, or hopelessness, fentanyl is a savior disguised as poison. Authorities speak of the war on drugs, of stopping the suppliers, of locking up the dealers. But rarely—almost never—does anyone truly ask: What about the people taking them?
What are they escaping? What is the root of the pain they are numbing? Why does the demand exist at all?
Because if there were no demand, there would be no supply.
And the demand… is monstrous.
We live in a world where prescribed drugs like Tylenol with codeine, OxyContin, and morphine are dispensed to ease physical pain. But for the forgotten, the abandoned, the street survivors, and the restless youth searching for something to hold onto—nothing hits the mark quite like heroin or fentanyl. These are not thrill-seekers. These are pain-refugees trying to survive in a world that does not hear their cries.
If we truly wanted to end the drug crisis, we’d stop focusing solely on the supply and instead look at what’s driving the demand.
But here’s the hard truth: there is no widely available, deeply effective way to alleviate profound human suffering that doesn’t involve numbing it. There’s no magic cure for despair. No pill for meaninglessness. No salve for an unloved soul.
So what’s the answer?
Maybe the only honest solution is this: the government becomes the primary distributor. Provide safe, tested substances to those in need—for free. Remove the stigma. Remove the crime. Replace the street with the clinic. Treat pain like the epidemic it is.
But then… what happens to the cartels when there are no more desperate customers?
That’s a question for another day.
Today, the real question is this: What are we going to do about the pain?
Until we answer that, we’ll keep dancing around the symptoms, while the painrages on.