The one NASTY reason why we can't take our children to parks anymore

Addicts and dirty needles are piling up in public spaces as heroin use explodes.

Many of us have participated in cleanup days where we join a group of friends and pick up litter at a local park. It's just something good people do to help keep their community beautiful. Sadly, those activities are becoming dangerous because heroin addicts are discarding needles by the thousands, a symptom of the growing opioid epidemic in the United States.

LOS ANGELES, CA (California Network) -- Americans have become craven, fearful of pain of any sort. In the past, pain was part of life. There were pains from old age, pain from illness, and emotional pain from life itself. Pain is the fruit of sin, and the curse of Eve. However, we have always understood that part of the experience of life includes pain, and we have endured it.

In recent decades, we have come to shun and avoid pain, and where we find it, we seek to kill it immediately. Painkilling drugs are everywhere. Just like the dystopian society in Brave New World, we now take drugs to avoid any kind of suffering. The problem with this strategy is that we don't cure the pain, we simply spread it to others.

Heroin is a classic example. Heroin is an opioid painkiller. It's powerful and almost instantly addictive. It dulls physical pain and fogs the mind to the point a person loses all capacity to care about anything. Heroin is usually injected into the veins, and the needles are commonly left about rather than safely disposed. This is causing public restrooms and parks to become littered with needles.

Parks and restrooms have become dangerous places to take children. In the mornings, addicts can be found lying about from the night before. Police rarely intervene because the problem is so common. During the day, there is the risk of a child encountering a dirty needle.

A needle prick can be painful for a child, and it can transmit disease. Hepatitis, tetanus, HIV, or residual dope can be injected into a victim. Even if no disease is transmitted, people often need to undergo painful tests to ensure they haven't become infected.

Cleanup efforts focusing on needles have been launched across the country, in an attempt to keep up with the growing opioid epidemic.

In 2015, more than 52,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses. This year, the number is on track to exceed 60,000. Along with the drugs comes the needles.

Police departments and EMT crews now carry Narcan, which is a nasal spray that counteracts the effects of opioid overdose. It's saving lives, but the fact that it is now part of every first responder's kit shows just how serious the epidemic has become. 

Cleanup efforts have collected needles by the tens of thousands from public spaces where they threaten people and wildlife alike. In San Francisco alone, over 13,000 needles were collected during a cleanup effort in March.

These numbers do not include those needles that are properly disposed of, and those that are gathered in people's homes. Include those numbers, and the epidemic is far, far worse.

We are poisoning ourselves because we have been conditioned to be terrified of pain. But pain is part of the experience of living. We need to rethink our attitude towards pain, and we need to provide paths back to health and well-being for people tempted to do drugs. We need programs to keep our public spaces clean. And we need to prosecute with all the resources of war, those who would poison us with their dope. Anyone who traffics in such poison must be punished beyond recidivism. Only then will our parks and public spaces be safe again.