We might as well start the year off just as stupidly as we finished up last year, and no better way to do that than with a reaffirmation of our wacky — nay, insane — statewide drug policies.
The Highway Patrol recently released a blurb touting how the agency made a record number of drug busts in 2016, setting the table for the cops to ask for even more money to throw down the rat hole of interdiction in the coming year. What the patrol didn’t tell the citizenry was this: While they were making a record number of drug arrests, the number of deaths due to opioids reached disturbing new heights. Here in Cuyahoga County twice as many people died from overdoses in 2016 (500), as died in 2015 (250).
If drug busts are up while overdose deaths are also up, this can only mean one thing: The more drug busts made, the more people will die from opioids. It’s really simple — the more heroin that’s taken off the streets, the more people will turn to stronger synthetic opioids. This is akin to what happened four or five years ago when Attorney General Mike DeWine made his much-ballyhooed (but stupid) crackdown on pill mills around the state.
Experts tried to explain to DeWine that cutting off the supply of controlled and clean doses of opioids (such as OxyContin) wouldn’t stop people from using drugs; it simply would mean they would be forced to obtain their narcotics from back alley sources, dealers who have no compunction against putting anything in the drugs they sell to increase their profits. Once street heroin replaced hospital heroin, dealers eventually began stretching their supplies with much deadlier fentanyl and carfentanil. Thanks, Mike.
The “War on Drugs” — the failure that has been going on for over 50 years now — has never shown any sign of solving the drug abuse problem in America, not in the slightest. Yet we still continue to pursue insane strategies while strategies that have proven to work get short shrift from policy and law makers. Money should be spent on treatment beds, not more drug-sniffing dogs.
If just a third of the billions of dollars — it’s probably more like trillions, but who’s keeping track? — that we’ve spent over the years on drug interdiction had been spent on harm reduction instead of simply locking people up, literally hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved, and millions more lives and families would not have been ruined by our overly punitive drug laws, which have turned us into an “incarceration nation.”
The fear is that, with a new administration soon coming into power in Washington, the little progress that has been made on this issue will be rolled back. The new attorney general, Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, is known to be an old-school “lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key” politician and sees nothing wrong with expanding prison populations while embracing privatization. That’s how he can help his friends — increase the value of their stock in companies that traffic in misery.
Some news or research organization should take a look and see how many state and national legislators own stock in companies like Corrections Corporation of America. That might prove very interesting indeed.
As PD columnist Phillip Morris recently noted, when someone rich, famous and beloved, someone like Prince, dies from an overdose, hearts and minds are softened and changed in regards to their views on drugs. People become more inclined to invest public dollars in treatment instead of incarceration.
So, with that in mind, wouldn’t it be fitting if a couple of the celebrities attending Trump’s Inauguration were to stop off after the event and cop some bad drugs and dispatch themselves to that great political party in the sky? Just kidding.
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 in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com