Jeff Nesbit was the National Science Foundation’s director of legislative and public affairs in the Bush and Obama administrations; former Vice President Dan Quayle’s communications director; the FDA's public affairs chief; and a national journalist with Knight-Ridder and others. He's the executive director of Climate Nexus and the author of 24 books, including "Jude" and "The Books of El." His latest novel, "Perfect Ambition," was released in June 2015. He may be reached at jeffnesbit@comcast.net.
United States News
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Title: We Have Lost the War on Drugs
Source:
U.S. News and World Report
URL Source: http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/at ... r-on-drugs-is-over-and-we-lost
Published: Dec 21, 2015
Author: Jeff Nesbit
Post Date: 2015-12-23 07:52:31 by Deckard
Keywords: None
Views: 3947
Comments: 30
Now that we have lost the war, what are we going to do about it? It's time, finally, to face the ugly truth. We've lost the war on drugs in America. We need a new playbook, now, before more lives are lost. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that fatal drug overdoses in America were the highest in recorded history in 2014. The news is grim. But what the new CDC data say about certain aspects of American society more broadly right now is even scarier, to be honest. CDC reported that fatal drug overdoses killed nearly 50,000 Americans in 2014, which is a new high. To put another way, more people died of drug overdoses than were killed in auto accidents last year. More than half of the deaths involved either heroin or prescription narcotic painkillers like OxyContin. These two classes of drugs were responsible for more than 28,000 deaths in 2014, the CDC reported, or 61 percent of the fatal drug overdoses. Despite an endless interdiction and criminal justice effort for seemingly forever, heroin and prescription painkillers are easy to find, easy to use, and relatively cheap to obtain on the street. No one in any demographic was immune. Men and women of every race and ethnic group, of all ages, were affected. If you want to get high, you're going to get high. The "war on drugs" isn't going to stop you. But here's the truly scary part. That number – 50,000 deaths from fatal drug overdoses – is double the number of Americans who died from drug overdoses in 2000. Let that fact sink in for a moment. After our government at the local, state and federal level has declared that we would "win" the war on drugs on our streets – an effort that has cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars; sent a significant proportion of young, black men to prison on drug convictions; and triggered violent police confrontations in known drug havens in urban areas – we have not only lost, we're getting overrun. How in the world is it possible that the number of fatal drug overdoses in America has doubled in just 14 years? I mean, how is that really possible in the wealthiest country on Earth? Here's how. We're playing a loser's game at every level with drug treatment and our societal response to what is happening inside people's brains when they enter the world of drug dependency. We're not recognizing just how victimized people are once they're on a path that, for 50,000 Americans annually leads to death from a fatal drug overdose. These numbers won't get better – this killing won't stop – until we recognize the true nature of this tragedy. More police on the streets, in the air, on the waterways and in the train stations and airports won't reverse this trend. Putting even more, young, black men in prison on drug charges won't solve the equation. Only a deep, caring understanding of the true nature of drug addiction will set us free. Once heroin "gets a hold of you," it never lets go, the son of a good friend of mine wrote in The Washington Post several years ago after he nearly died of a drug overdose. The only reason my friend's son survived is because his drug buddy - also high on heroin at the time - dialed 911 before he ran away, and paramedics arrived just in time minutes before his near-certain death from a heroin overdose. My friend's son is incredibly lucky. Tens of thousands of Americans each year aren't. Heroin takes all the pain away. And then it changes your brain. You don't worry about anything – whether you can pay the bills next month, whether you have the ability to raise a kid, whether your job might vanish next month – when you're on heroin. These types of drugs - heroin, and prescription narcotic painkillers – take hold of our brains and never truly let go. This is the pain that we need to understand. This is what we must confront and deal with in society. An endless war on drugs will never deal with this. We can take away the cheap supplies of heroin, make it infinitely harder to obtain prescription painkillers, and people will still find a way to obtain something that "gets a hold" of your brain and never lets go. There are many, varied examples of addiction across a broad swath of American society, addiction stories that all basically tell the same story – our brains are highly susceptible to things that take hold and don't let go. For instance, while smoking rates are thankfully now the lowest in American history – about 17 percent of Americans still smoke – we finally understand nicotine is powerfully addictive and it takes considerable effort to quit smoking. What's more, we now know that nearly 100 percent of smoking addiction occurs in an adolescent brain that's still being formed. Smoking "takes hold" of growing neurons and synapses in a teenaged brain and never lets go. Armed with that knowledge, families now understand what they're confronting with cigarettes and can help their kids. This is the sort of knowledge we need to confront in what is clearly an epidemic with heroin and prescription painkillers. When the number of fatal drug overdoses is double the rate it was 14 years ago, despite a massive criminal and legal war on drugs, then something is terribly wrong. To truly "win" this war, we need to focus on the victims, and give them what they need – which is compassion, understanding and knowledge about what it truly takes to break free of a narcotic that assumes control of our brain and never lets it go. (Video at the link) The number of people who died of drug overdoses in 2014 is double those who died in 2000.
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#1. To: Deckard (#0)
Again? Seems like we lose the war every six months. "More than half of the deaths involved either heroin or prescription narcotic painkillers like OxyContin." So the solution is to legalize heroin and make it available under a prescription. Wait. Then it will be just like OxyContin. Hmmmm. I know. Let's legalize both and make them available at the Walmart checkout line. That should cut down on overdoses, huh?
At least.
We lost that war during the sixties when we saw the emergence of a generation predominately characterized by rejection of adulthood and adherence to eternal adolescence with emphasis on immediate transient impulse gratification. They raised their kids to believe in the same mentality they had.
Hmmmm. I know. Let's legalize both and make them available at the Walmart checkout line. That should cut down on overdoses, huh? Exactly. That way I would be happy paying the taxes this GOD DAMNED regime has forced upon us.
The an answer is to make raw opiates legal and ban heroin or the second stage production of a drug. For example - allow coca leaves to be legally sold to adults but keep manufacturing and distribution of cocaine illegal.
The answer is to tell them where Narcotics Anonymous meets. It costs them nothing and, more importantly, it costs the taxpayers nothing. If we provide any more help than that, we're just making it easier for them to continue to use drugs. In my opinion.
The answer is for fossil failures like you to die off so we can correct your generation's mistakes.
When my generation dies off with a clear conscience, you can legalize whatever you want. This way you have only yourselves to blame for what follows.
You die off as failures who made things worse.
But legalizing coca leaves and poppies will make things better, huh?
Like they were in the past? The good old days of limited govt and original Coca Cola?
Heroin and cocaine were not made illegal because things were going well. Plus, that was way before those addicts were eligible for free medical, housing, food, rehab, etc.
Again, I stated heroin and cocaine should remain illegal but the raw product, the poppy milk and the coca leaves should be legal. You must be hitting the eggnog hard this Christmas Day. Merry Christmas to you. old timer! According to the Sears, Roebuck and Co. Consumers' Guide (1900), their extraordinary Peruvian Wine of Coca... "...sustains and refreshes both the body and brain....It may be taken at any time with perfect safety...it has been effectually proven that in the same space of time more than double the amount of work could be undergone when Peruvian Wine of Coca was used, and positively no fatigue experienced....."
Poppy milk is not a raw product. It is made by processing poppy seeds. If you were struggling to say "poppy resin," it gets processed too.
OH NO! More "Needle Park" dialogue is threatening the existence of mankind. Yet, who the fuck cares.
That's OK too - Heroin was a medicinal product that was refined to high purity. That is why it was named heroin. It was considered a hero drug for pain relief. My philosophy is that if it grows in the ground it is insanity to ban farming it.
moving the goalposts
No moving of goal posts. I don't know how heroin is extracted nor how it looks like as a plant. My thesis is that the raw product - be it the plant, or the leaf or whatever be legal to grow and to be sold with legal restrictions and oversights. The processing to a higher grade - say from coca leaf to cocaine - should be continued to be illegal. It is insanity to ban a plant.
Where the distinction between "raw" and processed is ambiguous and undefined. Lovely.
Lovely. Not really ambiguous. Keep it in the opium latex phase. Opium (poppy tears, lachryma papaveris) is the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum).[4][5] Opium latex contains approximately 12% of the analgesic alkaloid morphine, which is processed chemically to produce heroin and other synthetic opioids for medicinal use and for the illegal drug trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYZj9vmfi0 Every August, while Europe's bankers, lawyers, and other desk jockeys shut off their phones and head to the beach, the junkies of Prague set up camp in the poppy fields outside the city for a vacation of their own. For one glorious month, there are no cops to run from, no dealers to skirt—just acres of vermilion blooms and as much free opium as you can collect before nodding out. This year we joined the junkies on their heroin holiday, to learn how to turn the same poppies that seed our morning bagels into potent injectable narcotics and sample the most all-natural, locally sourced opiates Europe has to offer. If they ask, please tell our moms we went to Majorca.
Only dried latex? No more use of "poppy straw" opium and the opium seed "tea" infusion and decoction extracts in common use for the last three thousand years? How about opium straw, crushed poppy capsule, poppy chaff, and poppy husk? According to your source of choice, Wikipedia, poppy straw "is first pulverized, then washed as many as six to ten or more times in water and/or various acids and other chemicals, to produce poppy straw concentrate." It also links to the definition of opium at Dictionary.com, which reads, "the dried, condensed juice of a poppy." So you're changing that definition of opium to dried poppy pod latex only? Suppose for a moment that water-washed evaporated concentrate would still be considered opium, like it has been for the last few thousand years, rather than just dried pod-derived latex. How would you tell the difference? If poppy straw concentrate is allowed, would you be limited to water for extraction? Could you use vinegar? Lemon and lime juices? Other acid-based extractions? How about isopropanol alcohol? Butanol? Is there a list of acceptable solvents for "raw" product somewhere? Could you use warm water? Hot water? Steam? Your Wikipedia source also notes that, "A cultivar for opium production, Papaver somniferum L. elite, contains 91.2% morphine, codeine, and thebaine in its latex alkaloids, whereas in the latex of the condiment cultivar 'Marianne', these three alkaloids total only 14.0 %." Would your "raw" dried concentrate have to come from traditional cultivars, or would you permit newer high morphine content poppy strains and hybrids?
Why? Big demand for those products?
He doesn't care about poppies or coca leaves. He's trying to sell the idea that anything that grows in the ground should be legal. Once you buy that (though why anyone would I don't know), it opens the door to legal marijuana -- his true objective.
It's common knowledge that opiates and heroin were legal at one time. They were made illegal because of their negative effects on our society. "Those who do not know history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them." Perhaps you should take the time to learn those mistakes.
Once you buy that (though why anyone would I don't know), it opens the door to legal marijuana -- his true objective. This applies to marijuana - there is no objective. The war on drugs has failed. Best to allow some "red light districting" to funnel would be users into less dangerous drugs that can be easily quit while still banning the harder stuff.
Or banned because of moral panics like prohibition.
What is your standard of measurement? How do you define "failure"? "Best to allow some "red light districting" to funnel would be users into less dangerous drugs that can be easily quit while still banning the harder stuff." The penalties for using marijuana are so small it's effectively legal. If it's that important to you, move to a medical marijuana state and complain about back pain -- like 90% of the other dopers. Legalization implies societal acceptance. Which we don't.
Nationwide Prohibition came about only because banning by the individual states wasn't working. A lot of smuggling from the "wet" states to the "dry" states (which, of course, wouldn't happen if we allowed each state to legalize drugs, right?). A moral panic? Morality was a factor (as it is with all our laws), but Prohibition took years to enact and was driven many factors including health, safety, and the preservation of families.
:We Have Lost the War on Drugs"
#2. To: misterwhite (#1)
Seems like we lose the war every six months.
#3. To: Deckard (#0)
"We (government) need to do a lot less, a lot sooner" ~Ron Paul
#4. To: Deckard (#0)
We Have Lost the War on Drugs
#5. To: misterwhite (#1)
So the solution is to legalize heroin and make it available under a prescription. Wait. Then it will be just like OxyContin.
#6. To: misterwhite (#1)
So the solution is to legalize heroin and make it available under a prescription. Wait. Then it will be just like OxyContin.
#7. To: Pericles (#6)
"The an answer is to make raw opiates legal and ban heroin or the second stage production of a drug. For example - allow coca leaves to be legally sold to adults but keep manufacturing and distribution of cocaine illegal."
#8. To: misterwhite (#7)
#9. To: Pericles (#8)
"The answer is for fossil failures like you to die off so we can correct your generation's mistakes."
#10. To: misterwhite (#9)
hen my generation dies off with a clear conscience, you can legalize whatever you want. This way you have only yourselves to blame for what follows.
#11. To: Pericles (#10)
You die off as failures who made things worse.
#12. To: misterwhite (#11)
But legalizing coca leaves and poppies will make things better, huh?
#13. To: Pericles (#12)
"Like they were in the past? The good old days of limited govt and original Coca Cola?"
#14. To: misterwhite (#13)
#15. To: Pericles (#14)
heroin and cocaine should remain illegal but the raw product, the poppy milk and the coca leaves should be legal.
#16. To: misterwhite (#13)
Heroin and cocaine were not made illegal because things were going well. Plus, that was way before those addicts were eligible for free medical, housing, food, rehab, etc.
#17. To: Roscoe (#15)
#18. To: Pericles (#17)
refined to high purity
#19. To: Roscoe (#18)
#20. To: Pericles (#19)
My thesis is that the raw product - be it the plant, or the leaf or whatever be legal to grow and to be sold with legal restrictions and oversights.
#21. To: Roscoe (#20)
Where the distinction between "raw" and processed is ambiguous and undefined.
#22. To: Roscoe (#20)
#23. To: Pericles (#21)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium
#24. To: Pericles (#14)
"Again, I stated heroin and cocaine should remain illegal but the raw product, the poppy milk and the coca leaves should be legal."
#25. To: Roscoe (#20)
#26. To: Pericles (#14)
"According to the Sears, Roebuck and Co. Consumers' Guide (1900)"
#27. To: misterwhite, Roscoe (#25)
He doesn't care about poppies or coca leaves. He's trying to sell the idea that anything that grows in the ground should be legal.
#28. To: misterwhite (#26)
(Edited)
They were made illegal because of their negative effects on our society.
#29. To: Pericles (#27)
"The war on drugs has failed."
#30. To: Pericles (#28)
"Or banned because of moral panics like prohibition."
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