Transcript:
Governor Christie: Every time I go to a treatment center, whether it’s here in our state or somewhere else in our country and I sit with people who are in the midst of recovery, invariably one of the first things they say to me is, Governor, I'm from a good family. And my answer back to them always is, why would you think that I would think you weren’t? You see it’s part of that stigma that is baked in that they want to say I'm different, my family is a good family because they think that everybody thinks that if you're a drug addict you come from a bad family, an uneducated family, a broken family, a criminal family. We know that’s not the case. We know that this disease knows no bounds. It does not carefully pick and choose its victims based upon education, based upon socioeconomic status, based upon where you live. It is indiscriminate and so we have to stop being so defensive about this. We have to stop feeling like this disease defines whether or not we’re a good person or a bad person. What this disease defines is whether we will live or die based on our response to it and a failure to respond is absolutely unacceptable.
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