Nearly every day now I am seeing new profiles on the opioid addiction epidemic in this country, and that’s a really positive development. A year ago, all the news coverage seemed to be strictly local, and it was mostly to report arrests or announce funerals.
Opioid addiction is now a sufficiently disastrous situation in our suburbs that it is touching nearly everyone, which means that you are going to find concerned citizens in every swing-district in the country. Maybe you don’t know anyone personally affected, but there are hypodermic needles at the playground where you take your kids to play. Maybe your best friend’s teenage child is in a rehabilitation center out-of-state. Maybe you’re just worried that your kid is going to a school where people are popping a lot of painkillers. Whatever your relationship to this epidemic, it should not be a partisan issue.
This should be something that Congress is working on urgently and on a bipartisan basis. Every article I read about this is basically the same. About 80% of heroin users started out taking prescription opioids. Some had dental surgery. Some had their tonsils out. Some just knew someone who was prescribed the pills. Others have parents with chronic pain. Some were handed the pills at a weekend keg party. Still, heroin isn’t the biggest problem, since about 80% of fatal opioid overdoses are not heroin overdoses. The big mistake is to continue to see heroin as a distinct drug from other opioids. It’s not. It’s just more highly stigmatized, and a lot cheaper. I don’t think you are going to think it makes any difference if your kid turns into an Oxy-Contin addict or a heroin addict. Their behavior will be the exact same.
Kicking the habit is depressingly and discouragingly hard, and it’s an urgent concern because along with addiction comes not only the severe health risks but the criminal activity (and other morally depraved behavior) that is usually required to feed the monkey. If addicts don’t get clean quickly, they face the high prospect of death or a future of incarceration.
Local and state law enforcement are already figuring out that they can’t prosecute their way out of this crisis. On the other hand, while they can send kids to treatment rather than jail when they are caught using, it’s harder to overlook burglary and other associated crimes. People are still get locked up in droves for crimes they would not have committed if they had not become opioid addicts.
What we need is a comprehensive approach that focuses less on drug interdiction (although that is still an important component) and more on educating doctors about how and when to prescribe opioids, that places an order of magnitude more resources in the service of addiction treatment, and that educates parents, kids, and educators about what opioids really are and how addiction develops.
In Massachusetts, law enforcement authorities recently reported that 185 people have died of heroin overdoses in just the past four months – which didn’t include numbers from the state’s three largest cities. Nationwide, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), heroin use among persons age 12 and older nearly doubled between 2007 and 2012.
If we can’t agree on much else politically, we ought to be able to agree that we can’t ignore numbers like that.
Don’t encourage Congress. They will only inflate the criminal penalties and prison time. According to them, there is “no money” to do anything really new and the way Obamacare has unified the health care billing system makes forcing realistic treatment options into the health care system a long-term political issue.
The more practical strategy is to leverage a network of local treatment programs (and despite their theology, some Christian rescue missions do have a tolerable record of getting people off opioids) to create a workable model treatment program that can be pushed for expansion in friendly state legislatures before going to Congress. And after they have demonstrated themselves, one of the first funding sources to work on is the Veterans Administration.
Another approach that must be worked is with the medical professional societies and pharmacists to deal with cases in which physicians become pushers or patients intimidate physicians into over-prescribing.
Well, you make a decent point about not trusting Congress, but the advice they’ll get is pretty uniform. We need hearings on this.
And, you know how conservatives have no empathy until they are impacted personally?
Believe me, there are plenty of Republican congresspeople who are impacted personally, and they are hearing from their constituents with every greater urgency and alarm.
I was going to fix your headline for you, but it seems you already allude to that in this comment. Because really, “Opioid Addiction Awareness is Growing (Now that Enough Suburban Well-Off White Kids Are Getting Addicted” is more accurate.
No one cares when it’s black people, latinos, or poor white people, as neighborhoods like Kensington and North Philly demonstrate.
yeah, the fifty character limit for headlines here can sometimes lead to headline that are less than ideal.
I was in N. Philly signing up for healthcare at 22nd and Berks. I’ve never had a reason to go that particular area of town before.
Now, i’ve been in some rough neighborhoods. But man. 22nd and Berks you can see the impact of “who gives a fuck” really starkly.
Makes my neighborhood look like paradise.
I just did a google street view. Damn, you ain’t kidding…
One street was lined with uninhabited-yet-magnificent 3-story rowhouses, like an enormous 7-piece Lego brick on each side.
It made me angry, for so many reasons.
Part of the problem is the puritan desire to punish people for transgressions like drug use. Based on what we know about addiction and mortality risks, opiates should be a last-ditch pain treatment modality. The problem is that several drug categories that should be ahead, including ketamine and marijuana, are abusable drugs that don’t carry a high risk of mortality. And so they end up more strictly regulated, because if they were used instead, we’d still end up with addicts getting their jollies from meds, only now they wouldn’t be dying (much). And the puritans can’t abide that.
Same reason we can’t have naloxone in high demand. Users must be punished. With death if need be.
Ketamine is an anesthetic. Using it as an opioid substitute is a really bad idea. Marijuana might be useful in some situations, though.
It is used as an anesthetic, but lower doses sometimes help with pain. Possibly the hallucinatory side-effects are risky enough that it’s not preferable to opiates. But, man, those opiates are bad! At current growth rates, opiate overdose might soon be the leading cause of accidental death in young people.
It already is. Look it up, it just passed car accidents.
I’m going to plug a friend here. Some technical language, but you can generally understand what’s going on in this article.
TLDR; alternatives might be on the way.
Seems like everyone thinks banning something, opiates, abortions, unclean thoughts whatever, will certainly lead to a good end. That is never the case and history bears me out.
What we need is for these medical industry giants to come up with proper drugs for getting stoned. Good euphoriants wouldn’t addict one or give one a hangover and destroy one’s health.
I don’t think that education is a solution, nor prohibition. Did you all know that the need for intoxication is not limited to various mammals? Everybody does it.
Get real.
Part of the problem is the puritan desire to punish people for transgressions like drug use. I was going to fix your headline for you, but it seems you already allude to that in this comment. Believe me, there are plenty of Republican congresspeople who are impacted personally, and they are hearing from their constituents with every greater urgency and alarm.Cam Neely XXL Jersey