Trauma, Substance Abuse and Crime

For a time in my early twenties, I lived in a small city in Missouri. Having recently graduated, the move there was based on convenience rather than desire. I spent a varying amount of time walking around the downtown, where I would sit about and wonder fickle and errant about topics that were of little concern or interest to anyone but myself. One day after work I was walking downtown when a person experiencing homelessness came up to me and asked for money. I gave him more than his usual, so it seemed, because he insisted on shaking my hand and talking to me. He introduced himself as Chuck and told me that he was a Vietnam veteran. I introduced myself and we got to know one another. After our meeting, I’d see Chuck downtown. Usually in the summers. I’d stopped giving him money and instead took him out to lunch or dinner. We’d talk. I suspected he had a problem with alcohol, but we’d never talk about it. Over time I noticed the track marks. He told me that he’d never found what he could do in America after he came back from Vietnam. He told me about his failed marriage that broke up while he was away, told me about his parents. How he couldn’t sleep and the kind of people he’d be with. At the time I didn’t understand much of what he’d gone through, especially in relation to how powerful the substance abuse cycle invigorates itself by the power of traumatic experiences, in Chuck’s case the Vietnam War and his succeeding lack of support upon his return. It is a common experience for veterans in the U.S., but felt especially poignant during certain conversations with Chuck.

The accompanying sketch is meant to be a memory of Chuck. Mostly, a depiction of my misunderstanding of Chuck’s needs and what he was not getting, even as I sat with him and did what I thought was a good deed. The figure in the picture is not Chuck. I never took a picture of him. But the figure reminds me of him, sitting as he is as Chuck first sat when he asked me for some money. Seeking something we both knew not what and like birds on a wire commiserating in broad and sometimes unclear terms indicative of a steadfast and puerile misconception of attributable trauma.

The intersection of crime and trauma is a tragic misstep of circumstance, and realizing this quickly dismantles the frightening image of the hostile criminal who acts on some whim in service of evil deeds and vile acts. The substances we deem illicit are branded upon those who use them so that the act itself is demonized, so that the people themselves are dehumanized, in order to suit an order that seeks to rectify crime not with practices derived from study, empathy and rehabilitation but with the fundamental error of ignoring the human needs of people impacted by, in many ways, the tragic misstep of circumstance.

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