commonwealthfund.org This graph shows the spike in overdose deaths since the start of the pandemic.

HANCOCK — Former District Court Judge Linda Davis, from Macomb County, and co-founder of Families Against Narcotics (FAN) said the single biggest obstacle to sufferers of substance use disorder (SUD) is stigma, adding that media needs to play a bigger role in reversing the negativity of addiction by showing the positivity of recovery, especially now that the death rate from SUD has reached record numbers.

Nationwide in 2020, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention placed the number of deaths from overdose at 93,000. In Michigan, overdose deaths rose 16% over 2019, reaching a record high of 2,743, according to the CDC.

Experts attribute the spike to the isolation created by the COVID-19 lockdowns, which ground down the mental health of so many, but especially those who were battling SUD.

“When we were losing people to COVID, we responded with urgency,” Davis said. “We changed an entire healthcare system overnight. We built hospitals,” adding that factories manufacturing auto parts were converted to manufacturing respirators. Distilleries began mass producing hand sanitizers, and masks were made available with amazing speed.

“We were able to respond,” Davis said, “because we valued those human lives that were being lost to COVID,” she said. “We lost 93,000 people to addiction; 87,000 the year before; 84,000 the year before; 83,000 the year before. We had over 30,000 overdoses in Michigan alone last year, and we act with no urgency when it comes to this disease. And, that’s only because of the stigma.”

Davis’ statistics total 431,000 deaths over a four-year period, and that is just from drug overdoses. It does not address deaths from alcohol.

“We don’t feel that losing your life to addiction is the same as losing it to any other disease, and yet, we know unequivocally, that this is a chronic brain disease.”

Davis said she feels that the stigma is perpetuated by the media, which she said is unfortunate.

“When you think back, attitudes are formed by what we read and what we see,” she explained. “And for as long as I can remember, as a small child, when you saw someone on T.V. who addicted to drugs, they were laying in the gutter with a needle in their arm, pills strewn all around them; they were homeless, they were vagabonds.”

As a result of those things, she said, we people think about addiction, those are the scenarios that come to light.

“We never see ads that are talking about people in recovery — that people get well from this disease. We only talk about the wreckage. We never talk about the recovery aspect of it.”

“And, we in the industry need to do better. At FAN (Families Against Narcotics), we have started to put together a media guideline for how to report on this.”

“So, when I do a television show for Channel 2, I tell them I’ll do this program with you, but you’ll show no needles, no pills, you’ll show people in recovery with their families; you’ll show the positive side of addiction, because we visually need to change what people see when we talk about addiction.”

“We need to be doing programs that perpetuate hope and recover, and wellness, rather than the downside. I mean, we’re showing pictures when people are at their worst. That’s not where most people that are suffering from substance use disorder live.”

“A lot of them hold very influential jobs,” Davis pointed out. “We need to be talking about it publicly. We see people in the gutter. That is not where addiction is. It lives in our households.”