The Anti-Heroin Act was signed into law by President Coolidge in 1924. It was repealed and replaced by the Controlled Substances Act in 1970. The upshot is that heroin has been illegal for longer than most everyone has been alive.
And how has that been working out for everyone?
33,000 people died in the U.S. from opiate overdoses in 2015. For 2016, that may be 48,000. Depending on which story you read, opiates cause two-thirds to three-quarters of all fatal drug overdoses.
No, I'm not going to snark about how Big Pharma has been complicit in this, by doing its best to neuter bills to combat opioid misuse, and how Trump almost appointed one of the pro-opiod congressmen to be head of the DEA. That's just typical for Trump, he's turning regulators over to the regulated industries.
No, my point is more that the law enforcement model for fighting heroin and other opioids has been in play for almost a century and it has been an utter and abject failure. Each step of the way, we give up freedoms and liberties to help "fight the scourge of drugs".
It hasn't worked. It's about time that we start to think of another approach.
No, I don't know what that would be. But I do know that the tools that we've been using to address drug use haven't worked. When it comes to fighting drugs, we are like a drunk looking under a lamppost for his keys. Continuing to advocate for a century's-long failed strategy has to be a sign of either insanity or retardation.
Let's try and get smarter for once.
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(And no, I can't shake the feeling that if skag wasn't mostly killing white folks (82% of those who died from opiates in `15 were white), this national conversation wouldn't be happening.)
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Monday, October 23, 2017
12 comments:
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Heroin addiction is not combated by prison sentences. My Dad had a phrase that sticks in my mind. "You cannot legislate morality".
ReplyDeleteDrugs, Whoring and the like have been with us throughout history. The use of, has never been much affected by any law.
I could see a world where people are educated about drugs, without the "Evil" moniker attached, and drugs are legal but frowned upon.
Many European countries have open drug policies and don't have mass addiction. It can work here too.
It is the one thing we haven't tried to combat drug use.
w3ski
Here's a couple admittedly unconstitutional ideas:
ReplyDeleteAll drugs legal to own and use, but not to manufacture. Recreational drugs manufactured and sold by a government non-profit agency. 1% of doses are fatal. All drug deaths are reported with graphic images and stories via reality TV.
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Using any drug is legal, but selling and distributing is illegal. Blackmailing drug dealers is legal. Blackmailing manufacturers is legal. Junkies will, of course, need money for drugs. Every source of drugs will start to look like a source of money. But only once.
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Using drugs is legal, if they are government-manufactured. Anyone caught with a more than personal supply of drugs gets immediately injected with the entire quantity. (Yeah, that won't work. It would just let the cops murder anyone they want.)
Or, like Portugal, they simply decriminalize amounts for personal usage, along with only selling it in pharmacies where the purity and quantity are guaranteed, and have a small tax on it for rehabbing those who want to get off the Red Poppy train.
ReplyDeleteAccording to a long-ago newsletter from my then Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, heroin was the first synthetic narcotic, that it was synthesized by Bayer, who tried it on their employees, who said it made them feel heroisch, that is, heroic....hence the name.
ReplyDeleteAnother newsletter told of how he would set visiting Russian Communist dignitaries back on their heels by mentioned how he'd talked personally and at length with Lenin and Stalin.
That was only constituents' newsletter I ever read eagerly. He was a brilliant man, but flawed yes....sometimes brilliance itself is a flaw.
W3ski, I had a boss in IT at a small liberal arts college who said something the same, viz: you cannot control human behavior with technology....we were have computer hardware stolen from the computer lab and I suggested surveillance CCTV. He thought the simplest way to make it difficult was best: just lock it down and make it really difficult and time-consuming to steal stuff.
Prohibition has never worked. Leave aside the admitted motive of the Nixon administration that the "war on drugs" was a tool to harass, surveil, and discredit political enemies, and go straight to Hunter S. Thompson, who in a column in the San Francisco Examiner said something to the effect of every regime to come to power in China for thousands of years has sworn that they would crush the opium trade, yet the price of opium on the streets of Singapore is roughly the same as it was in 900 BC.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, last I checked, Portugal's decriminalization hasn't raised the number of young addicts, but has drastically decreased the number of new HIV infections.
Perhaps we need to find a way to have more effective solutions than "thou shalt not."
-Doug in Oakland
Drug prohibition does not effective at preventing drug use. But that is only one of the purposes of the program. For the purpose of letting Nixon crack down on his political enemies, it worked just fine. For the purpose of letting cops rough up anyone they want to with the magic words "I smell marijuana", it also works just fine.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, making such substances not illegal removes, to a large extent, the profit from them.
ReplyDeleteGangs lose money (and power) very quickly then, and therefore influence.
An oversupply of drugs, however, might kill off many users quickly. Making it expensive and hard to get keeps, somewhat, a limit on how much they can use daily.
Still, it would change things, and what we are currently doing doesn't work, and gives power to the organs of the State, with the results we have seen.
Having said that, the Patriot Act is just as effective as the War on (some) Drugs has been in giving power to the Minions of the State over the citizens.
Legalization would cut out the criminals. On the other side of the coin, most of the DEA/narcotics cops would have to find honest work, too.
ReplyDeleteLegalization would allow for consistency in dosing. Users would be able to buy the dose that they needed and not run the risk that it was much stronger or cut with fentanyl or carfentanyl. It wouldn't be cut with toxic or unsafe fillers.
I can't picture millions of people rushing to the glamorous life of a smack addict. but we can cut away 90+% of the crime and the health risks.
The "addicts should suffer" crowd are just as amoral as those who cheered when people suffered terribly from drinking methanol during Prohibition. Those moralists are disgusting excuses for humans.
There is an interesting correlation (I know, not causation) between states that have legalized marijuana and lower death rates from opiates. I only know that since I moved to Oregon I stopped using medical opiates to treat my chronic pain.
ReplyDeleteI have ranted at length about how I have friends who have done prison time for selling drugs while the marketing department at Purdue Pharma got away scot-free and filthy rich for pushing untold tons of Oxycontin on the society by claiming timed release made it less addictive so the rules shouldn't apply to them.
ReplyDeleteToday I read an article in Esquire about the family behind Purdue Pharma, and it turns out to be even worse than my ranting would lead you to believe. I, having seen the inside of a jail cell, don't usually wish prison on anyone (except the Wall Streeters who crashed the economy and their ilk) but the Sackler family should have been in prison for years, and all of the ones responsible for Oxycontin are already dead, so it's too damn late.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-family-oxycontin/
-Doug in Oakland
In the Netherlands you get your heroin at a government dispensary and inject it right there in a clinical setting with a nurse supervising, using a fresh needle. You can't take it outside of the dispensary. You get only a limited amount per day. Addicts say it's the most dreary, clinical, depressing way to get high that you'll ever encounter, and mostly they don't even get high anymore, because all they get is a maintenance dose. Most of the Dutch addicts are wishing they could get clean because being an addict is so depressing, but apparently curing heroin addiction is hard, because it makes permanent changes in the brain. But if they want to seriously try it, all they have to do is tell the nurse and she'll hook them up with all the de-tox programs etc. that they'd ever want. Most end up back at the heroin dispensary again though. Just like most opioid addicts here end up back at their local dealer again after going through rehab...
ReplyDeleteBadTux, for a while, the British government gave their addicts their doses at the chemists’(pharmacy to you Americans), they would take it home and shoot it up. The British found that 5% of heroin addicts in a years time, so their approach was aimed at natural attrition and harm reduction.
ReplyDeleteAs for Dutch addicts, there was a researcher some 50 or 60 years ago who got herself addicted to both cigarettes and heroin as part of her
research, because Science! She reported that quitting cigs was harder than quitting heroin.