Native people in US seek to end cycle of addiction

In early spring more than a year ago, Rachel Taylor opened her son's bedroom door and found him face down on his bed, his body ice cold. Taylor's son was one of more than 100,000 people in the US who lost their lives to drug overdoses last year.

White Earth Nation, Taylor's tribe in northwestern Minnesota, looked into the lives they have lost to addiction. One of the questions that White Earth and other Native American communities are facing is how to stop the next generation from starting the drug addiction cycle anew.

For Taylor herself, she lost custody of her son and a daughter for a couple of years as she was fighting her own addiction to opioids and cocaine.

$590m settlements

Last week, Native American tribes in the US reached settlements over the toll of opioid addiction totaling $590 million with drug manufacturer Johnson & Johnson and the country's three major opioid distributors, AmerisourceBergen, McKesson and Cardinal Health, according to a court filing. The companies deny any wrongdoing.

Under the deal, Johnson& Johnson will pay $150 million over two years and the distribution companies will contribute $440 million over seven years. Johnson & Johnson reported $20.8 billion in net income last year.

The drugs, including both prescription drugs such as OxyContin and illicit ones including heroin and illegally made fentanyl, have been linked to more than 500,000 deaths in the US in the past two decades. The coronavirus pandemic has overshadowed the US' opioid epidemic for the last two years, but recent news that overdose deaths surpassed 100,000 in one year caught the public's attention, reported The Associated Press.

Native Americans are at least twice as likely as the general US population to become addicted to drugs and alcohol, and three times as likely to die of a drug overdose, according to a study from the Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health.

Data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in December found Native Americans had the highest drug overdose rate in 2020 at 42.5 deaths per 100,000.

Drug overdose deaths were a culmination of generational trauma among Native Americans, a study said. Much of the misery was passed from generation to generation, as Native Americans lost their ancestral land, language and culture, relocated to reservations and mostly lived in deep poverty, according to the study published last year.

In the White Earth Nation, Taylor's grandmother was sent to a boarding school where she was taught to be ashamed of her Ojibwe language. Taylor told the AP that she tried to break the cycle for years, and she said she knew how her son, who had a drug addiction, was living because she had lived it, too.

"There is no amount of money that's going to solve the generational issues that have been created from this," Chairman Kristopher Klabsch Peters of the Squaxin Island Tribe in Washington state told The Washington Post. "Our hope is that we can use these funds to help revitalize our culture and help heal our people."

Agencies contributed to this story.