America’s drug overdose crisis is out of control. Washington, despite a bipartisan desire to combat it, is finding its addiction-fighting programs are failing.
In 2018, Republicans, Democrats and then-President Donald Trump united around legislation that threw $20 billion into treatment, prevention and recovery. But five years later, the SUPPORT Act has lapsed and the number of Americans dying from overdoses has grown more than 60 percent, driven by illicit fentanyl. The battle has turned into a slog.
Even though 105,000 Americans died last year, Congress is showing little urgency about reupping the law since it expired on Sept. 30. That’s not because of partisan division, but a realization that there are no quick fixes a new law could bring to bear.
Have they considered doubling the number of prisons and providing police with tanks?
No, this is seen as a drug that white people are addicted to.
Treatment and compassion only.
(Not joking)
America’s response to the opioid epidemic is a far cry from treatment and compassion. They’re literally charging friends (addicts) of overdose victims with murder just for being associated by redefining “drug dealer” to be super broad and reclasifying ODs as poisonings.
Amazing read: He Tried to Save a Friend. They Charged Him With Murder.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed a law this month to reclassify fentanyl overdose deaths as “poisonings,” and Arkansas passed a “death by delivery” bill in April to charge some overdoses as murders in an effort to deter anyone from selling or even sharing fentanyl. Prosecutors in Alaska, California, Florida and at least a dozen other states were beginning to pursue new murder cases against any defendant who fit under the wide-ranging definition of a fentanyl dealer: a 17-year-old in Tennessee who, after graduation, shared fentanyl in the school parking lot with two of her friends, both of whom died; a husband in Indiana who bought fentanyl for his disabled wife, who overdosed while trying to numb her chronic pain from multiple sclerosis; a real estate agent in Florida who threw a party and called 911 when one of her guests overdosed; a high school senior in Missouri who gave one pill to a 16-year-old girl he met at church and warned her to “only do a quarter and then do the other quarter if you don’t feel it.”**
Yeah…as a white person from Appalachia that’s definitely not the case in large swaths of the country where the actual plan is “fuck those poor hillbillies, let em die.”
Yeah… It was a culture shock going from Marietta/Parkersburg area to college in Akron … just in terms of like “wait, you went on vacation out of the country!?”, “cedar point wasn’t the vacation but just a thing you did one, two, three, many times during the summer?!”, etc
Pretty much fully incognito as a college educated urbanite now, but the roots are still there…
Oh hey there, MOV. I probably know your family lol. I grew up in Belpre. And I hear ya about the culture shock. It took me a long time to realize that Appalachian is a thing I can identify as
You guys aren’t “that” kind of white. I’d guess the Appalachian racism was a pivot from Irish targeted hate, and got a pass to keep going through the years bc poor and Catholic.
Correct. While technically “white” in that I am able to access the benefits of white privilege by masking my accent and dressing “fancy,” we are not the WASPs most people think of when they think “wypipo”
Don’t give them ideas. They’ll have everyone and their mothers working in a private prison factory by winter!
Everyone’s either a convict making products or a guard, it’s the perfect citizenry!
No , but I understand invading Mexico is on tap
20b is less than 3 days of military spending. thats how important this is to us.
3 days.
you want to solve this, decriminalize the national healthcare crisis that is drug use. put an actual percentage of the ‘defense’ budget against it. stop pretending like throwing a one time pittance at a shitty program is going to solve it.
We did that in Oregon, ballot measure 110, and it’s been a disaster. Crime is up. Overdoses are up. You know what’s not up? People seeking treatment.
Here’s how it works… You get busted with drugs, it’s a $100 fine. The fine is waived if you seek treatment. 16,000 people got ticketed. Less than 150 sought treatment. :(
Because treatment is technically voluntary, people won’t do it.
Meanwhile, Honduran gangs are setting up open air drug markets 3 blocks from police HQ.
It’s unfortunate that Oregon didn’t setup the necessary infrastructure and processes that are used by countries who have successfully decriminalized drugs. Cops often walk by people doing hard drugs on the street rather than doing their jobs. There isn’t anyone forcing addicts into treatment if there’s continued recidivism, and perhaps most importantly - the biggest factors driving people on the streets to use drugs (no money, no stable housing, no mental health counseling, etc.) are not being addressed.
Many people would rather see measure 110 fail so they can go back to prohibition (which obviously doesn’t work). Decriminalization and legalization are cheaper and more humane, but progress requires multiple parts of the government to actively help people.
Yup. Everyone talks about wanting to follow “The Portugal model”, but failed to recognize:
a) Portugal still has punishments for non-compliance.
b) Portugal has universal health care.
Decriminalizing drugs without those two key things isn’t going to work.
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/09/18/oregon-measure-110-portugal/
"In Portugal, drug users must appear before a commission that determines whether the person needs treatment or should pay a civil penalty.
“They don’t just assume that everybody will pop into treatment on their own,” Humphreys said.
And the system includes other measures that don’t exist in Oregon. For example, the commission could suspend the driver’s license of a cab driver until after treatment, he said, giving state officials leverage over users.
In Oregon, police officers write $100 citations that are not criminal penalties. Drug users are supposed to pay the fine or call a hotline to be assessed for treatment. But addicts often ignore the citation and don’t follow up with treatment, according to news reports."
Did Oregon do anything to address why so many people want to use fentanyl? You can fix people with drug abuse treatment when the drug abuse is a symptom of a larger problem—like homelessness—that’s going untreated.
Unfortunately, no, and like I say, overdoses are through the roof and it’s not just the homeless. People thinking they’re getting one drug, getting fentanyl instead. Kids getting it accidentally. Teenagers being stupid.
Yeah, but if the military cuts back any further, they may have to delay the building of the 79th aircraft carrier!
Before the Isreal Hamas flare up I saw reports saying the US was mulling the idea of ground presence in Haiti. The military looks more apt to try and find problems to insert themselves rather than not spend taxpayer money. God forbid they let their budget go down.
Surely the military budget isn’t 2.4 trillion dollars? Or am I misunderstanding?
Almost like it’s caused by broader societal issues
What if people do drugs because their actual lives are dissatisfying because literally everything they could do to enjoy themselves or socialize with others costs money at a time when inflation and poor planning has made the things they need to live more expensive and pay isn’t keeping up because of the greed of a relative minority?
Or it’s just that people like drugs idk I’m not a psychiatrist or senator.
I am guessing in some cases it is a combo of psychological trauma plus external stressors like being broke af.
But drugs also cost money
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Yes, but the current state of crisis unfolded because pharma corps like Purdue lied about addictiveness thanks to the consult of such upstanding groups as McKinsey, and then the printed billions in cash for almost 2 decades while the top of the funnel of opiod users exploded. The bottom of the funnel, your meth, heroin and fentanyl ODs and related crimes are the cost of that years laters as addicts inevitably spiral downward. Pharma companies took what used to be an extreme and made it mainstream by hooking everyone from high school kids, to those injured at work on their products.
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And poor people have themselves to blame for routinely electing officials that go against their interests.
This is not a false statement.
Just let doctors prescribe painkillers fucking christ. Kicking legit patients off meds drives this entire issue.
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I had minor surgery last year and the sent me home with an opiate prescription. I didn’t take it because the effects to me are worse than the pain, but they did give it to me.
Exactly. My partner has chronic pain from an old car accident. Their neck is full of screws and bolts. Medications like oxycontin are literally the difference between them having a tolerable active life, and being in constant excruciating pain. Yeah I know a lot of people abuse it. But all the regulatory responses are just trying to make it harder to get, it’s like performing brain surgery with a sledgehammer and people like my partner get caught in the crossfire.
If they want to fix the problem they should address pharmaceutical advertising, both to doctors and patients. Get rid of the kickbacks.
There also needs to be a differentiation between different levels of pain. The case like you described seems like one where opioids are warranted. An opioid addiction is the lesser of two evils here. But if someone has chronic back pain because they sit all day and are overweight (not trying to shift blame here), opioids are an overkill and all painkillers can only be stopgap measures to tackle the root issues.
Exactly. And that’s what a doctor is supposed to do. That is why certain medications require a prescription. Much in the same way that it’s considered better to let five criminals go free than to unjustly punish one innocent, I think it’s better to let five people who arguably don’t need it get medication than to deny it to one person who truly does need it.
There is an attitude in this country that if something is being abused, especially medication, that the best and only response of government and society should be to make that thing harder to get. But that doesn’t stop abuse. It has literally never worked in the past, and it does not work now. If someone is addicted to prescription painkillers and you deny them the prescription, they aren’t going to say ‘aw shucks I guess it’s time to clean up my life and get a job’. They’re going to get their fix somewhere else.
And the result is that real patients get harmed. My partner is lucky to have a good medical team. But you hear lots of stories of people who go for surgery and get literally cut open and are sent home with basically Tylenol because the surgeon is terrified to have too many opiates on his prescription record. That isn’t okay. Our solution to one problem is not only making it worse it is causing another problem.
This is an oversimplification.
And so is the legislative response that put us here.
Doctors prescribing painkillers is exactly how this got so bad. As someone who came of age in the mid '00s and watch this all start unfolding firsthand in many of my peers, 100% of them began their addiction using prescription painkillers like Vicodin, Percs, and Oxy. Literally all of us knew someone selling them, family members who had extra and would give them out, friends/coworkers who’d share with you, etc because they were so easy to get a (or multiple) prescriptions for and you could sell the rest.
I know personally at least half a dozen people who wound up ODing and dying. I know at least two dozen more who battled through it, did jail, did rehab, lost jobs, or became homeless. Many made it through and stopped using, but now 5, 10, or 15 years later still have the cloud hanging over them and have to actively manage the cravings.
If you’re a ‘legit patient’ and you turn to heroin just because you can’t get painkillers, you’re already addicted to opioids. That’s not driving the issue, it is the issue.
If you’re an American who isn’t part of the wealth class, not a lot of great reasons not to numb your pain if you can.
“Oh but you have so much to live for!”
Yeah, spending most of your waking hours making rich assholes richer in exchange for just enough to subsist off of to stave off death by homelessness. What great fucking lives that must be protected, amirite?
It is a public health crisis. Cops can’t fix a public health crisis. It’s not their job, they are not trained to do so. This was the heart of defund the police. Not to get rid of police but to redirect funds to agencies that are trained to fix non police problems.
I don’t see what cops have to do with this.
Why not raise taxes on the wealthy to fund social services?
Prohibition was 100 years ago and we still haven’t learned that it doesn’t work
Well, it made for some great movies.
Doesn’t work for who?
Seems like a great way to keep poor people desperate and dependent on ridiculously expensive drugs.
Heroin isn’t a dangerous drug, just addictive. Legalisation would mean fewer deaths as quality could be regulated like other prescription drugs.
The only way to stop this is for the government to start selling clean and affordable heroin.
“efforts”
“Opposite of progress” and all that
Congress’ what now?
I love that it’s the cop that looks like he’s got the opiate lean going on in this photo.
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Make a nationwide ban on Narcan. Wait for the problem to fix itself. Total cost $0.00.
So your solution is to just let people die then and not actually fix the underlying issue. Okay bub.
If the junkies die they take their ‘underlying issues’ with them.
People using the drugs isn’t really the issue that needs solving. It’s people dying and being harmed by them. Narcan is good, not bad. Make it free and easily available and save tax payer’s lives. Total cost: negative.
Yeah because everyone knows most junkies pay taxes… Narcan will never be made free, all that means is someone else, like the actual tax payers, are paying for it. The world would be a better place without Narcan.
Lol. Do you think all drug users are homeless and jobless?
If Narcan can save them they may not be homeless yet, but it will happen soon. For the sake of argument let’s say 50% are without jobs. The problem is still half way fixed, or twice as good as it is now.
Why would we assume that? Hell, about half of homeless people are still employed.
Regarless, the cost would be very low compared to all the other costs we pay for. It may even save money with fewer unpaid ER visits and things like that, totally ignoring saving taxable incomes.
I know you’re probably just some edgy teenager who things denigrating a group of people who you don’t know anything about is cool or funny, but it’s really fucked up. Have some empathy for your fellow man. We’ve all got shit going on, and it can all be improved on if we help each other.
I’m a 53 year old man and have zero empathy for anyone that allows themselves to degrade that far. I don’t care about their bullshit stories of a hurt back and started with a prescription…The fact of the matter is every idiot on the planet knows there is no good end to heroin use. I completely disagree with you. Ban Narcan, make the world a better place for the ones that are contributing and trying. Stop throwing money away on the ones that statistically will always be a burden to the rest of society. If that doesn’t make sense I’ll assume you haven’t lived long enough to have perspective on the greater good. Good luck.
