Today I went to pick up my three children at their father’s house. It was Super Bowl Sunday, 10 minutes before the game, and I was picking up my kids early because Dave, a late-stage chronic alcoholic, was drunk again.

His father was not in his right mind and was not happy about the early termination of his Super Bowl party. He swore at me several times in his loudest voice, he yelled at me to get out of his house and hovered over me, threatening to hit me. I am clearly a second-hand addict, an innocent person drastically affected by someone else’s addiction.

Dave’s mother was there, a quiet, refined woman from class. She soon found herself begging her 44-year-old son to let her grandson go and stop insulting her former daughter-in-law. Clearly, this peaceful soul is a secondhand addict, an innocent person drastically affected by someone else’s addiction.

My children were 14, 12 and 10 years old. They heard the threats and verbal attacks. My middle son was being forcibly held in his father’s lap. How would this and similar events imprint on his growing brains? How would it affect their lives as adults? How would the constant onslaught of such negative role models affect your upbringing? So also, how would this parenting affect their children one day? Clearly, these three, and all of their children to come, are secondhand addicts: innocent people drastically affected by someone else’s addiction.

Leaving the house, I called my ex-brother-in-law. I was afraid that when I left, Dave would turn his uncontrollable rage on his 80-year-old mother. Now my brother and sister-in-law were missing the super bowl to take care of his mom. They don’t like his brother very much these days. You can’t blame them, but it eats away at their souls. Clearly, they and their brothers and sisters are all secondhand addicts, innocent people drastically affected by someone else’s drinking.

Dave doesn’t have a job these days, having lost his when he couldn’t function to do his job anymore. So now we can add his abandoned boss to the list of second-hand addicts, not as drastically affected, but affected nonetheless.

Now we can move away from Dave and multiply all of these 20 or so people by the millions of addicts in the world to account for all of his family, employers, and close friends.

Can we begin to get an idea of ​​how many second-hand addicts there are in the world?

But wait, our list is not over yet. Now we need to add all the people who have been killed by a drunk driver. And we need to add all of your grieving family and friends. So the list gets longer. And we must add all the people who have ever been mugged, physically assaulted, or even killed by someone who was high or needed money to get high. And we must add the family and friends who sat outside the Intensive Care Unit as they waited to see if their injured loved ones survived. They are second-hand addicts, people drastically affected by someone else’s addiction.

And they don’t even know it.

And the list gets longer.

But our list is not over yet. Many of our addicted citizens find themselves homeless at some point. Therefore, we must add to our list of second-hand addicts all the people who work the daunting task of helping them. And while we’re at it, we need to add the people who work the desperate task of trying to find jobs for addicted people, only to see their efforts fail time and time again. Everyone is severely affected by someone else’s addiction.

And we need to add the people who pay for all these services, as well as those who pay for the jails full of addicted people. We need to add you as a contributor to our list. Because you’re a secondhand addict, and you don’t even know it.

This blog is designed to help those whose lives are drastically affected by someone else’s addiction. And it is designed to send the message to each of us that we are all greatly affected by the addicted people who live among us, whether we know it or not.

And I’m not sure exactly what we’ll do once we figure this out. The answer is certainly not to shame and blame addicted people, which will only make the problem worse.

But I know this…

To change something, you must first see it.

So I’m here, along with my blog posts, to help you see the problem.

So I invite you to continue reading.