Posted on 12/22/2021 9:10:45 AM PST by Kaslin
For more than a century, the U.S. government has failed to prevent Americans from consuming politically disfavored intoxicants. Worse, it has systematically made drug use more dangerous by forcing consumers to rely on black-market products of unknown composition, and by pushing traffickers toward increasingly potent substances that are easier to smuggle.
The ongoing opioid crisis, which has driven drug-related deaths to record levels, illustrates both of those phenomena. But instead of recognizing the lethal effects of prohibition, President Joe Biden is doubling down on a strategy that has never worked as intended.
Last week, Biden signed two executive orders aimed at combating the "transnational criminal organizations" that "contribute directly to tens of thousands of drug-overdose deaths in the United States each year." One order replaces the federal government's Threat Mitigation Working Group with a brand-new U.S. Council on Transnational Organized Crime; the other authorizes sanctions against "foreign persons involved in the global illicit drug trade."
"In the last two decades," a "senior administration official" told reporters during a conference call, "the nature of drug trafficking has changed dramatically." Illegal drugs nowadays, the official said, are "more potent, addictive and deadly and able to kill in mass numbers," as reflected in "the skyrocketing death rate from synthetic opioids."
During the year ending last May, according to estimates from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. saw more than 100,000 drug-related deaths, up 23% from the previous year and 46% from the year before that. Three-quarters of those cases involved opioids, and 85% of the 75,000 or so opioid-related deaths involved the category that includes fentanyl and its analogs.
These record-breaking numbers reflect the perverse impact of the government's efforts to reduce drug-related deaths. The surge in fatalities followed a successful campaign to reduce opioid prescriptions, which drove nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes that are much more dangerous because their purity and potency are unpredictable.
Between 2010 and 2017, the number of opioid prescriptions per 100 Americans fell by 28%; the rate of high-dose opioid prescriptions -- defined as 90 morphine milligram equivalents or more per day -- fell by 56%. Meanwhile, annual opioid-related deaths have more than tripled since 2010.
In a 2017 interview with the Carlisle Sentinel, Carrie DeLone, Pennsylvania's former physician general, confessed that "we knew that this was going to be an issue, that we were going to push addicts in a direction that was going to be more deadly." Her justification: "You have to start somewhere."
For a sense of where that attitude can lead, consider what happened after OxyContin, an extended-release version of oxycodone, was reformulated to deter abuse in 2010. A 2017 National Bureau of Economic Research paper concluded that "a substantial share of the dramatic increase in heroin deaths since 2010" -- perhaps as much as 80% -- "can be attributed to the reformulation of OxyContin."
The proliferation of fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute has compounded this problem by making potency even more variable. "Today's drug trade no longer relies on crops or requires vast acreage," the "senior administration official" noted last week, "but instead on synthetic materials and precursor chemicals."
That trend also is driven by government policy. Fentanyl, which is roughly 50 times as potent as heroin, is a logical choice for suppliers dealing with government efforts to suppress the drug trade, since it makes production and distribution less conspicuous and more profitable.
At the import level, RAND Corporation researchers estimated in 2019, "Heroin appears to be at least 100 times more expensive than fentanyl." And because fentanyl is much more potent than heroin, a package weighing less than an ounce can replace one that weighs a couple of pounds.
"Historically," The Hill noted in its report on Biden's executive orders, "drug trafficking organizations have been quick to adapt to new law enforcement strategies." Yet somehow the government never seems to anticipate that reaction, or its deadly consequences.
Pot legalization drives homelessness.
Libertarianism is great until they start talking about drugs, then they go right to stupid.
Yea, let’s legalize heroin so the cartels won’t develop cheaper more powerful versions. That’ll work.
I’ll call my buddy who lost his son to an overdose last week and let him know some moron thinks they should legalize it.
Here’s a better idea. Dealers get executed.
What is ignored: the despair driving most of those ODing on opioids (fairly young white males) and the forces driving this despair.
Unless you want to legalize very addictive hard drugs like Heroin, LSD, Fetanyl, then you’re going to have some level of prohibition.
Now the only question is where do you draw the line?
A by product of open borders, of which the media is silent. Disinformation, no doubt.
Right or wrong, I’ve always been a conditional libertarian so far as drug use is concerned. Prohibitions are not any sort of solution. Human nature is too perverse, and devious.
So, on one condition, legalize all drugs. The condition is that whatever a person does while lit is considered deliberate in any trial. E.g., if driving under the influence results in someone’s death, you are guilty of 1st degree murder if proven guilty of deliberately taking the drug. No manslaughter, 2nd degree or any “eh didn’t mean to”. Yes, eh did, he took the drug. Now, choose your execution method.
There will be a period of lots of accidents, but we will purge the system of the inherently stupid. Following generations will protect one another, like: “uh, no, don’t light that cigarette while covered in gasoline. We will enjoy the show, but your Mom will kill all of us.”
Meanwhile, Xiden’s handlers enable AND SUBSIDIZE both narcotic smuggling and human smuggling with their open border policies.
Worked in China. Once Mao started executing anyone peddling or using drugs, the problem absolutely disappeared.
So I guess you are mistaken when you say "prohibitions are not any sort of solution." History says they work when you make it hurt bad enough.
“I’ll call my buddy who lost his son to an overdose last week and let him know some moron thinks they should legalize it.”
I can understand your anger and your friends pain. I’ve attended funerals for two people who overdosed on street drugs. Both of them were long term pain patients who had been denied their prescription pain meds under the new laws.
One had been involved in a terrible auto accident and had nearly died. When he was sent home from the hospital the doctors told him he would deal with pain the rest of his life. Oxycodone allowed him to lead a, more or less, normal life. When the new laws kicked in here in Virginia the doctors refused to prescribe his oxy. He was sent to pain management therapy and basically treated like an addict which did nothing for his pain.
He ended up turning to heroin which did take care of the pain. It also ruined his life.
He ended up overdosing on some heroin that included too much fentanyl.
The other person was much the same story. Constant pain every minute of the day due to an industrial accident.
Doctors took his pain meds away and he went looking for relief.
Dead within a year.
Both of these people would never have used illegal drugs until pushed into it by the government.
“Here’s a better idea. Dealers get executed.”
Publicly and painfully.
The problem is this: once something becomes legal, it usually becomes “okay” and then a societal “good” (gay marriage, as rare as it is), pot (medicinal!), etc., vociferously protected from societal criticism and even championed as “heroic” (e.g. single motherhood).
Yes, “society” can be unjust and cruel, an example being past treatment of children born out of wedlock and their (sometimes blameless and unfortunate) mothers who had been raped or “led down the garden path” by unscrupulous men who had pledged marriage to young women lacking male relatives to enforce a “shotgun marriage” before impregnating them, then reneged on that promise. Innocent chidren, in no way responsible for the unfortunate circumstances of their births were cruelly and unjustly punished by society. So were their unfortunate mothers, even if victims of violent, forcible rape.
Was it just and right for society to stop punishing these blameless babies and abused women? From a Christian perspective, of course it was! But it seems “society” is not long capable of granting tolerance and acceptance of the deserving few without switching over to first condoning and then celebrating whatever was once considered a “societal ill” within a few generations, thereby proliferating what was once (and objectively is) a societal ill.
It’s as though “society” operates much like a binary computer program (0/1). Once a “bad” (0) becomes legal, it rather quickly becomes a “good” (double-plus 1).
Hence, we now celebrate single mothers, gays, transgenders, and pot, etc. Opioids next? If they become legal as “recreational” drugs...
” black-market products of unknown composition,”
Scary, yes, but do these do black market products account for a large percentage of deaths?
I’m thinking of California’s legalization of Marijuana, which, because of the tax they place on it, has made illegal production flourish.
They harass the legal and prescribed opiate users and force them to the easier and cheaper street drugs. Then it’s down hill.
“They harass the legal and prescribed opiate users and force them to the easier and cheaper street drugs. Then it’s down hill.”
Exactly right.
There has never been a government solution that didn’t make things worse. Exponentially worse.
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