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.
