I have no doubt that the story of opiate addiction in Northern New Mexico is a ghost story. The ghosts of our ancestors and the ghosts of lost land haunt the region and cast shadows that I believe we either do not sense or understand. Death lingers and taints the area’s present consciousness – we live painfully aware that giants in boots can come along, any day, and crush our lives and send us into the abyss of alienation. Not from the world, but from ourselves.
My own ancestors were driven from their own lands and had to figure out ways to just “be” in a new government that valued individual gain above communal gain. When NM became a state (and also while it was a Territory), opposing forms of law and education and language made life quite difficult for the Hispano. Even today, I see Hispanic families that attempt to maintain their “extended family” economy and fail miserably. The truth is that what may have been successful three generations back is no longer viable. The sad fact is that several Hispanic families in this region have clung tenaciously to ideas about economics and “togetherness” that are more toxic than they are healthy. A ghost is a ghost, whether social or actual.
I’ve known people who desperately want to get clean, but face immense pressure from their own families to continue using heroin. It’s almost the same argument I faced when I left the barrio: The neighborhood always made comments about me thinking I’m too good because I went to college and didn’t accept that poverty was my destiny (another ghost of my own). In the same way, I’ve heard people actually say that their father/uncle/brother told them that they thought they were “too good” for the family by getting clean. As little sense as it makes to an outsider, because I understand the pressure of family history, I at least understand the pressure the person who seeks sobriety faces within his or her family system.
Family pressure is a combination of social and genetic programming. Basically, I think ghosts are coded into our DNA. Usually, when someone’s addicted to something in Northern New Mexico, and if that family has been here at least three generations, then the programming model I’m presenting suggests that the tendency towards addiction probably has been passed down from one generation to the next. I have evidence to that end, which I will share as appropriate. The painful truth is that the genetic susceptibility and the region’s social programming has created a situation in which it’s an almost inescapable fact that my home and culture has been tainted from the legacy of isolation and economic marginalization that our history has developed. The only question is: What do we do about it?
