Our medical practice recently lost one of our most precious patients. She was a wonderful young mother of three with a supportive husband. She lived a beautiful, productive, and typically hectic life as most working mothers do.

One day she was healthy and the cornerstone of her family and the next day she was struggling to hang on to her life. She died from a rapidly fatal, idiopathic (we have no idea what caused it), failure of her liver. Perhaps it was a virus or even a complication of her medicines. We truly don’t know.

Today I received papers requesting a disability through the Social Security Administration for a patient that is also apparently failing in her health and now unable to work. But rather than being idiopathic in nature, her disability can be clearly blamed upon her repeated methamphetamine abuse.

She also is a mother of three. Her extended family and I watched as she abandoned her husband and children and chose to pursue her addiction. I watched and prayed as the grandparents stepped in to nurture the children, give support to the father, and try to hold together what remnants existed of a once thriving family. 

How can that be? How can we provide disability support for those who wantonly choose to destroy their lives and family through drug abuse? I am not trying to be uncaring and hardened, but even God “…gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts…” Romans 1:24. There must be consequences for actions. As a society, we have neither the financial resources nor the available manpower to provide social security disability for these people.