They too are Sons and Daughters

What is mankind that you are mindful of them,

human beings that you care for them?

You have made them a little lower than the angels

and crowned them with glory and honor (Psalm 8: 4-5)

It was the first week of November 2023. I had just returned to Los Angeles after nearly six years in India.

Walking back from Mass, I noticed what I took to be an old man and an old woman crossing the street. Both were bent sharply at the waist, their upper bodies nearly parallel to the ground. They moved slowly, dragging their feet in what remained of their shoes. The man had a strange jerky limp. At moments they held hands; sometimes they drifted apart, one trailing behind other. Pity was my first response, and I found myself unable to look away. This is what Los Angeles has become, I thought. However, I couldn’t help but exclaim, “what a sad picture: old, handicapped and homeless.” My brothers corrected me almost immediately: “They are neither old nor handicapped. They are under the influence of fentanyl. That is the fentanyl fold.”

What I knew of fentanyl was limited—that it was a medication administered by doctors when other pain treatments fail, and that in 2018 the state of Nebraska had used it in an execution. Until that moment, I had not realized how widely available it had become.

Later on, when I started noticing more young people on the streets under the influence of such potent drug, my first thought would almost always be, “these young people are somebody’s sons and daughters.”  They have names and stories. They were once children, students, workers, loved ones. Their current condition is not the whole story of who they are.

What most people mean when they speak of fentanyl is not the carefully administered medication used in hospitals, but its illicit form manufactured in underground labs and often mixed with other substances, like tranq -- the street name for xylazine -- a powerful sedative and analgesic used exclusively in veterinary medicine (for animals such as horses and deer). It is extraordinarily potent, far stronger than heroin, and acts quickly on the body, producing a brief and overwhelming effect that fades just as rapidly.

It was only after that day that I began to notice its presence everywhere in Los Angeles. Again and again, I saw young men and women folded onto themselves, their bodies bent at unnatural angles, suspended between waking and unconsciousness. What is often called the “fentanyl fold” is not a medical term, but a visible sign of a body overtaken of a person no longer fully aware of their own posture, their own surroundings, even their own pain.

One user described it as a state in which “your brain and body are at odds,” a kind of waking dream in which you do not even realize what position you are in. Another spoke of the strange cycle: the drug taken to dull pain, yet deepening it --“it makes everything worse.”

About two years ago, videos started circulating on social media sites like X and TikTok of people experiencing the fold on city streets. People who commented either did out of disdain or empathy. But whatever the reason was whether mockery or compassion, videos like this produced more awareness of this new “pandemic.”  Faced with this, my perception seems to stop at the surface. I see distortion, absence, collapse. I do not see what the psalm speaks of.

And yet I am reminded of something Louis Dupré recounts in The Deeper Life. As a young soldier in the Belgian army, he was assigned to a military hospital and placed under the supervision of an elderly nun -- “a gracious woman of refined manners.” He remembers watching this frail, aristocratic woman assigned to a ward of hard-drinking, loud-cursing soldiers. For her, each of them was Christ. Dupré admits his confusion. One might choose to treat others as if they were Christ, out of discipline or charity. But for her there was no “as if.” She did not look for resemblance in behavior or virtue. She saw, quite simply, the same divine life in them -- a life that, in Christ, reaches its fullness (The same with Mother Teresa who spoke of “Jesus in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor”).

I find myself at a distance from that kind of vision. Confronted with the “fentanyl fold,” I do not see Christ. I see bodies bent and unresponsive, persons absent from themselves. Whatever glory the psalm speaks of does not present itself to my eyes. And yet, if what Dupré describes is true, then the failure cannot rest in them. It must lie in my own perception --- in my inability to see what remains, even when it is no longer visible.

Perhaps that is why, when I watched a crime drama on Netflix called Dabba Cartel, I recognized the same patterns of human frailty, even across continents. The show follows five ordinary middle-class women in Mumbai who transform their traditional dabbawalla (lunch box) delivery service into a drug-smuggling operation. They begin with “special” herbal supplements, only to be drawn into stronger drugs and a corporate scandal involving fentanyl. The story interweaves the everyday and the illicit, revealing the human stakes behind what might otherwise seem abstract.

Watching it, I realized that the fentanyl “pandemic”, though visible on Los Angeles streets, is part of a larger, global story and the challenge, as Dupré’s nun demonstrates, is to see the life that persists even when the surface suggests absence.

“What is mankind that you are mindful of them?” the psalmist asks in wonder, not despair. Human beings, though fragile, are crowned with glory and honour by God Himself. And yet on the streets of Los Angeles, that glory appears obscured. The bodies folded over by fentanyl -- bent at impossible angles, disconnected from awareness, reduced to an empty shell -- seem to contradict the psalm altogether. Nothing in what I see readily speaks of glory; nothing in their posture suggests honour. And still, the claim remains. If they are indeed crowned with glory and honor, then that truth must be present even here, where it can no longer be perceived.

Perhaps the question is not whether that glory is there, but whether I am willing to believe in it when I cannot see it.

PS: Please note these images are not AI-generated; they are authentic photographs I furtively took.

Blurb

What most people mean when they speak of fentanyl is not the carefully administered medication used in hospitals, but its illicit form manufactured in underground labs and often mixed with other substances like tranq.

The fentanyl “pandemic”, though visible on Los Angeles streets, is part of a larger, global story, and the crisis is spreading to many places.