SNL tackles issue that’s no laughing matter

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, April 20, 2016

I’m the first person to admit I love to laugh.

I love good jokes.

In college, my friends were some of the goofiest people around and they were always telling jokes to keep us all laughing.

We would watch Saturday Night Live and we loved it enough we even used Will Ferrell’s Gus Chiggins character as a password for our college server.

This week there has been an exorbitant amount of chatter and outrage over SNL’s skit advertising a fake product called “Heroin, A.M.”

It’s a touchy situation.

Chemical dependency is existent.

The heroin epidemic is real.

It’s certainly no laughing matter.

In fact, heroin addiction has doubled in the last 15 years and heroin-associated death rate is up some 286 percent.

It also has no boundaries in demographics.

I’ll admit, I was fuming when I watched it, but the more I studied it, I decided maybe SNL is bringing to light a controversial matter — kind of an elephant in the room topic.

Many people don’t want to talk about drug abuse in their families. There are all kinds of excuses. It’s taboo. It’s for skanky people. It’s for people in gangs. It can’t happen in my family. We’re too good for that.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but drugs don’t pick and choose who they stake claim to.

Your family isn’t “too good” to get sucked into drug addiction.

People of all walks of life choose to use drugs. Sometimes it’s for things such as bad knees and backaches, you know, legit things. Not necessarily the thrill of getting high.

Legal prescriptions for painkillers such as oxycodone and hydrocodone have become the gateway drugs to heroin.

In the SNL commercial, it shows a mom, who is a school bus driver and a father who coaches little league using Heroin A.M., which is advertised as a combination of heroin, caffeine and a small pile of cocaine.

While it may seem atrocious to think of those scenarios, let’s be real.

Doctors prescribe opioids every day to people that you come across in your life every single day.

From the little league coach to the bus driver to the pastor to the little old lady on the front row at church, I guarantee you know someone who uses prescription pills for something.

Sometimes people logically take the correct dosage. Other times, people become addicted. They overmedicate and their bodies become overly dependent.

And unfortunately, heroin can be a much cheaper option of getting high than buying pills off the street.

Everyone always says we have a meth epidemic and that’s true. But pay attention. There’s a pill and heroin epidemic, too.

And it’s not a laughing matter.