As educators and law enforcement officials scramble to curb the opioid epidemic that’s claiming an ever-increasing record numbers of lives each year around the country, it won’t be too long before we hear some coroner or medical examiner pine for the “good ’ol days” when all he had to contend with were heroin overdoses.
Thanks to our wrongheaded drug policies, new and dangerous substances such as fentanyl (which is 80 times more powerful than morphine) and carfentanil (which is 10,000 times more powerful that morphine) are now on the streets killing young people, and other — perhaps even more powerful and dangerous drugs — are on the way. The potency of these opioid compounds is only limited by the imagination of the chemists halfway around the world who diabolically concoct them. And with record high prices and profits, stopping the trafficking in these death-inducing substances is a fool’s errand.
Nonetheless, it’s an effort American law enforcement is all too willing to continue, in spite of the abject failure of our nation’s 50-plus-year “war on drugs” which really was a war on people. Now chickens are coming home to roost — on the dead bodies of addicts across the country.
Drug awareness programs are currently being ramped up in high schools and on college campuses. And while I applaud the concern of educators, I know that such efforts alone have a zero chance of solving the crises, and a major reason is trust. Young people don’t trust what DEA agents have to say; after all, these are the same folks — the narcs — that continue to perpetuate myths about marijuana and criminalize youth for no good reason.
The fear is that as the epidemic spreads, so too will the insanity of the wrongheaded solutions that failed us to this point. Instead of adopting European-style modalities of “harm reduction,” we’ll simply try to lock up more dealers, totally ignoring the fact that this method of addressing the problem is what got us in the mess we’re in to begin with.
Harm reduction, according to a national organization, the Harm Reduction Coalition, “is a set of practical strategies and ideas aimed at reducing negative consequences associated with drug use. Harm reduction is also a movement for social justice built on a belief in, and respect for, the rights of people who use drugs.” This is thinking based on the humane principle of doing whatever it takes to reduce the amount of harm done to addicts.
The organization’s website further states that it “accepts, for better and/or worse, that licit and illicit drug use is part of our world and chooses to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn them.” As a society we’ve run out of room to ignore opioids — they’re killing too many of our young people, but we don’t know how to stop condemning them.
Decriminalization is the only solution, like it or not. If opioids were regulated and made available to addicts in a safe environment, the deaths would go down immediately and dramatically. The problem as it stands is that abusers are forced by our insane laws into back allies to score their drugs, and they are clueless as to what they are actually buying.
The first step in solving the drug overdose epidemic is to provide addicts with pure, unadulterated drugs, and to do so in a non-judgmental manner. Then, once the individual is stabilized, inpatient and outpatient treatment and education can commence.
It’s only a matter of time before this common-sense approach to the opioid overdose problem is adopted in this country, but unfortunately only after we’ve buried additional thousands of young people for no other reason than our own stupidity.
Our current drug policies are so insane and so harmful, they border on criminality.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com
2 Responses to “MANSFIELD: Looking Back to the ‘Good ‘Ol Days’ When Heroin Was King”
Bill R.
Dear Mr. Frazier,
I completely agree. It’s not like we would be embarking on a dangerous experiment that has never been tried. The Netherlands and Switzerland have taken this approach for decades with great success. Both countries are highly successful with great standards of living. There just isn’t enough money to be made by solving this problem correctly and making money is what the USA is all about.
R Willis
You are 100% right. I Really hope that One day, hopefully sooner rather than later the American government will admit and acknowledge the great folly and crime against humanity that is the war on drugs and hopefully end it before millions more die and loose their freedom for years either because of completely preventable overdoses or the mass incarceration of people ( disproportionately of color ) simply because they are involved in drugs ( which have been legal for 99% of the history of mankind ) one way or another. It is imperative that we put a stop to this cruel and ridiculous war and begin to treat addicts and users as the human beings that they are and stop denying them their rights!!
R Willis