Finding a used syringe at my building for the first time. Also, people injecting on the subway platform.

February 1, 2025 by Joshua
in Addiction

Context: I post about addiction not to comment on the individuals in the pictures but to reveal our culture. The images are only the most poignant representations of it, but they differ only quantitatively from, say, TikTok, Amazon, flying, McDonald’s, Facebook, doof, or other addiction. My goal in connecting it to ourselves is not to make anyone feel bad, but to empower people to act. If you don’t know the connection, you don’t realize your potential power and influence.

If you think these pictures don’t illustrate part of your life, you’re dreaming as much as someone buying sugar in 1800 thought they weren’t funding plantations because they weren’t holding the whip.


I pick up litter everyday. We have created a culture where I often don’t have to cross a street before finding some. If you buy disposable things, your money helps fund this culture.

Some litter hits me more than others. This morning I saw a used syringe in the little garden that is part of my building’s facade.

How would you feel to find a used syringe on your property, in your front lawn? It’s tempting to point at everyone else as causing this situation or at police or elected officials for not stopping or preventing it. But, I repeat, when each of us pays for disposable things, for the fossil fuels driving the overproduction of everything including fentanyl, we fund the culture that creates these outcomes, including you. Nuclear would driving it faster. Solar and wind don’t drive it any less. Technology serves the people and culture wielding them and our culture values and rewards people addicting other people.

The more money you spend on extraction, the more you drive the system that creates these outcomes, as my book Sustainability Simplified shows. Read it.


Want more?

Here’s a picture from the other day of people injecting wide open on the subway platform of my local station. See the syringe in the left hand of the guy in the black coat?

I asked them if they were okay. They said “One hundred percent.”

I tried to engage to talk, but they just said, as best as I could tell to themselves, “a thousand percent,” and continued to say higher and higher numbers to express how okay they were and that they weren’t interested in talking to me.

Also the guy in the black coat got out a latex band and put it around his arm to inject.

Read my weekly newsletter

On initiative, leadership, the environment, and burpees

We won't send you spam. Unsubscribe at any time. Powered by Kit

Leave a Reply

Sign up for my weekly newsletter