Before Covid-19, there was another health crisis grabbing headlines in our country. An estimated 128 people in this country die each day from an overdose of opioids, a class of drugs that includes legal prescription medications like oxycodone and illegal substances like heroin. Prescription opioids gained popularity in the 1990s when drug companies manufactured new medications such as OxyContin and marketed them as having a low-risk for addiction. Many users of prescription opioids go on to abuse them, then turn to heroin and the much more potent and fatal fentanyl. While opioid prescriptions have fallen in recent years, deaths from heroin and synthetic opioid overdoses continue to rise. Every demographic group has been touched by the opioid crisis, although low-income whites are the most likely to be prescribed opioids and die from overdoses.
For the past two months, leaders from the Kairos Center’s Reading the Bible with the Poor Cohort have been convening a weekly online gathering called the Freedom Church of the Poor. This formation brings together leaders from different frontline battles like the fight for living wages, immigrant rights, healthcare, and housing. We are Christian, Jewish and non-religious; leaders with the Poor People’s Campaign, scholars and clergy; and we come from every region of the country. By taking the name of Freedom Church of the Poor we join a much longer history and tradition of resistance to ideological and religious forms of control and domination.
