Drugs don’t just hurt the people using them. They can also hurt people trying to help others.

For example, some drugs are so powerful, you don’t have to willingly take them to feel their effects. You can experience their effects just by touching such drugs by accident. That’s what has happened to a number of paramedics and police officers across the United States. They’ve come into contact with opiate/opioid drugs when responding to emergency calls or investigating crime scenes.

One deputy in Maryland investigating a suspected drug overdose became dizzy and experienced an overdose himself. A paramedic who gave the deputy the drug Narcan (naloxone) also overdosed and needed medical help. (Narcan is a drug that can counteract the effects of an opiate/opioid, a type of drug related to opium.)

These overdoses illustrate that using drugs not only hurts people who take them intentionally, but can create a great deal of collateral damage to others who are innocent bystanders and/or trying to help.

As we’ve seen from the police officers, paramedics, and first responders hurt accidentally by drugs, drugs can physically hurt others. They can also hurt others in other ways. Using drugs can hurt and even destroy families.

Say a man and woman abuse drugs. If they have children together, there’s a good chance that the parents’ drug use can affect the children. It can harm them physically even before they are born, as pregnant women who do drugs can pass the drugs they use to their unborn infants.

After their children are born, drug-addicted parents will likely be so wrapped up in locating and using drugs that they could neglect their parental duties. That’s not a moral judgment but an illustration that drugs can cause cravings and addictive behaviors that condition the brain to want drugs over everything else, even caring for a person’s own children.

Drugs and addiction, then, change people and their priorities. They affect so many people and in so many ways.