Title: Drug War Fail: Govt’s Own Study Shows Fatal Overdoses Have Doubled Over 15 Years Source:
Free Thought Project/National Center for Health Statistics URL Source:http://thefreethoughtproject.com/dr ... s-doubled/#twFyEw3v4klLFWs6.99 Published:Dec 25, 2016 Author:John Vibes Post Date:2017-01-05 10:32:15 by Deckard Keywords:None Views:3868 Comments:12
Over the years, as the drug war has fueled the ever growing police state in America, the actual drug problem and occurrence of overdoses continues to grow. This fact is obvious to anyone paying attention, however, this was recently confirmed by a US government study, released by the National Center for Health Statistics.
According to the study, drug overdoses in the US have increased by 23% between the years of 2010 and 2014. Furthermore, since the year 2000, the occurrence of drug overdoses has doubled. The study also noted that 25% of all overdose deaths in 2014 were attributed to heroin. Many of the other drugs listed in the study for having a high risk of overdose were actually prescription opiates that are very similar to heroin.
The study also found that more people than ever are overdosing on Methamphetamines. Methamphetamine overdoses have doubled in just four years, between 2010 and 2014.
In the year of 2014 alone, over 47,000 people died from drug overdoses in the US, which is double the rate that was seen just over a decade prior.
Deaths from fentanyl, a synthetic opioid like the majority of drugs in the top ten list, have increased by a factor of 2.5 since 2010.
In 2010, heroin was fifth on the list of drugs that led to the most overdose deaths, with 3,020. Heroin overdose deaths in 2014 were more than triple that amount.
CDC director Tom Frieden explained in a recent interview with PBS that a wide range of opiates are very easy to obtain, through both legal and illegal means.
“Really, there are two driving forces. First, doctors are prescribing way too many opioids, for too many conditions, for too long, for too many patients. And this is a major problem. Second, there’s been a flood of illegal opioids, not only heroin, but also synthetic fentanyl and drugs that are inexpensive and widely available. And those two things are making a very difficult problem continue to get worst,” Frieden said.
See the interview with Tom Frieden Below:
Government representatives and mainstream media pundits act like a solution is mysteriously out of our grasp. However, the solution is obvious, we need to end the war on drugs, including heroin.
Heroin addiction is a serious problem, but as counter-intuitive as it sounds, the best way to prevent heroin overdoses is to actually legalize it. Certain areas of the world, like Portugal, where all drugs have been decriminalized, there are far fewer overdoses than there are in prohibition countries. The Washington Post reported earlier this year that drug overdoses are extremely rare in Portugal, and they have some of the lowest rates of addiction in the world.
People have the impression that under drug legalization, things would just be out of control and drug addicts would be everywhere, but this is not what actually happens when drugs are legalized. Currently, under the state of prohibition that most of the world experiences, the treatment, and help addicts receive is severely limited, mostly to punishments and highly regulated inpatient and outpatient programs. In an environment of prohibition, the strategy is punishment, instead of harm reduction, which is actually a much more humane, realistic and effective way of handling serious social problems like heroin addiction.
Examples of harm reduction tactics would be needle exchange programs, drug testing kits at raves, or supervised safe houses, just to name a few. Teaching condom use for sexual education, instead of abstinence is another example of how harm prevention is applied to other social issues.
Also, there is growing evidence that a person’s social, economic and personal factors have a much larger impact on their probability of getting addicted than we previously thought.
As I have explained countless times in the past, these types of dangerous knock-off drugs are a direct result of prohibition. If you have missed my previous drug war articles, I will summarize how prohibition makes drugs more dangerous.
In the black market, one of the major drawbacks is that there is no accountability among the people selling the drug. Since anyone can get kidnapped and thrown in a cage for even dealing with the stuff, it really doesn’t make sense for people to be plastering their names and logos all over the drugs.
In this age of corporate mercantilism logos and branding may seem like a really tacky idea, but when looking at the black market we can see the value in such things. Someone who is selling a product with their name on it, is going to go through far greater lengths to ensure the quality of their product, as opposed to someone who would remain anonymous.
The anonymity creates an incentive for people to be dishonest with what they sell, leading to rip-offs or downright contamination of the drug with unwanted harmful substances. This is why there was bathtub gin that would make you go blind if you drank it during alcohol prohibition. This is also the reason why some of the harder street drugs today are cut with toxic chemicals that increase the chance of overdose ten fold. The fact that the drugs need to be smuggled also creates the incentive to make drugs more potent, and thus, in some circumstances more dangerous.
The increased potency and decreased availability inevitably leads to a massive increase in cost. The increased cost is a whole other issue with its own unique side effects in regards to drug safety. When the price of the real drugs go up, people just start huffing paint thinner, smoking bath salts and cooking up crystal meth in their basements, which is then even many times more dangerous than the unbranded drugs on the black market.
If you want to stop the overdoses, decrease crime, and deal a death blow to the for-profit prison system, there is a simple solution – End the War on Drugs.
Well, the theory is that if you make heroin legal then everyone can use it then no one will die of an overdose.
Problem solved!
Well, maybe you DO just let people use and die of overdoses.
Maybe the price of trying to save people from themselves is too high (in terms of money, loss of freedom and collateral violence) to continue.
I do know that the illegality of drugs certainly doesn't make them hard to get in my well-heeled Connecticut town, and that the kids have access to everything. And I know that it's a crapshoot as to whether a kid's training and upbringing will cause him or her to make the right decision when faced with the temptations.
So, my view is essentially that the law does not prevent the drug flow at all, at least not in my income bracket, and doesn't protect me or mine from the drugs. The violence inherent in the illegal drug trade certainly DOES make me and my family less safe from violent crime than they would be were the drugs legalized.
On the other hand, if the drugs were legal there would be other dangers. For starters, a lot of people would be driving around high. Legalizing the drugs will certainly mean that more people, of all ages, will try them. And some will get hooked. Crime will go down, drugged-driving deaths - which are as random and devastating for other people as drunk-driving deaths - will go up.
What's more, it's easier to persuade teens to avoid illegal drugs, which are after all, illegal, than it is to persuade them to avoid alcohol. Alcohol is legal and they see all adults drinking. They know it's not really deadly at all - if its use is controlled. If drugs are legal, they will see more of that from "normal" people, and drugs will become like alcohol...except that drugs are MUCH more potent and immediately addictive than any alcohol. A small amount of drugs will blow your mind - it takes a lot more alcohol to do that. So, if we legalize drugs, I am pretty certain that we will lose a lot more teens, in particular, to drugs than we would otherwise lose under the current regime of illegality.
In a sense, in order to save teens from being destroyed, to continue the drug war one must be willing to lose more adults to violence and crime. I am not enthusiastic about that choice, but I rather firmly believe that that really IS the choice we have made, and I don't find arguments that ignore this factor to be honest.
And then finally there is the simply the matter of power and revenge.
ALL laws are disobeyed. People are arrested, fined and imprisoned for violating every statute in the book. We could certainly reduce those arrests and imprisonments by striking down as many laws as we can, but that butts up against the concept of representative government itself, and our desire as a community to impose standards through law, and to punish those who defy our collective judgment.
Everybody knows that prison conditions are terrible, and while some of us do care about that - I do - and would like to see that addressed, it is not very high on just about anybody's priority list simply because, to a very real and not very subtle extent, a criminal headed to prison is somebody who has given the middle finger to the majority of society, and told us that he will set the rules for himself and will not follow the laws that we collectively decide upon. The hiring of police, and specifically their armament with guns and grant of authority to assault and kill lawbreakers is, in a very real sense, our collective assertion that, in the end, we set the rules in our house, and just as we will use the army to literally kill anybody who invades our borders, we will use our police to kill anybody who defies our laws also.
And then too, there is the matter of the person who has lost his or her loved one, particularly a child, to illegal drugs. The moralists can cluck all they like about choice, but the one who has experienced the loss also knows that the drug dealers and distributors have ALSO made a choice - to break some very harsh and well known laws, in order to make themselves a lot of money selling poison to people. And those who have experienced the loss of loved ones view those drug sellers and producers as murderers of their child, and want to see them killed. They are willing to pay the price of crime and of loss of civil liberty for the grim satisfaction of knowing that the lives of drug dealers are short, that many of them die horrible deaths or rot in prison, and that they deserve all of the agony, suffering and terror they get, and the Hell that awaits them after the grave, for having been the agent of death of their loved ones. This is pure revenge, and in a democracy, people can legitimately vote that a major function of the law be to extract deadly revenge on the people who have imposed such misery.
The extreme end of this view would be Duterte's war on drug pushers in the Philippines. Our "War on Drugs" is failing, but with thousands of drug users and pushers dead in Manila, and hundreds of thousands racing to the government to turn themselves in to avoid being killed, it is entirely possible that Duterte's violent, direct approach to non-judicial slaughter of everybody involved in the drug trade may, in fact, destroy the drug trade. Certainly it eliminates the problem of recidivism.
Where do I come out on it all? Undecided. And in such a position, being a conservative, I go with the status quo and do not want to see the drug laws struck down just yet.
If the people want to vote pot legalization I don't care. I doubt that Americans anywhere would vote to legalize any OTHER drug. Cocaine? Meth? Heroin? No, Americans would not legalize those things. So, as I usually find to be the case, once again the democracy seems to have gotten it about right.
Legalize drugs? Pot - ok, if the state's citizens vote for it. Heroin, cocaine or meth? No. Even though that means a continued loss of civil liberties, and higher crime, and a high death toll among drug sellers, and organized crime that burns rivals alive in some places. Under the alternative scenario, it is simply different people who will die, notably young people, teenagers. I suspect that FEWER people, overall, would be dying if all drugs were legalized (although the experience of China with opium in the 19th Century should give anybody pause - opium destroyed the whole society), but that more of those dying would be simple users and ignorant teens. Right now, the people doing more dying are the criminal element involved in the illegal trade.
Am I willing to sacrifice fewer innocent lives in order to save more guilty lives and civil liberties? In the end, no. I'd rather 10,000 people involved in the drug trade be killed by crime, and perhaps 2000 people killed by collateral damage, than to knowingly legalize substances we know are poison, and lose maybe 1500 more young people we otherwise would not have lost.
In the end, I am willing to trade criminals lives and some civil liberties to save more young lives. I recognize the trade I am making. Seems to me that criminals, by defying the law to make money, in a sense deserve to die. Drug users don't necessarily, but our bodies simply cannot handle these drugs and they will die, in substantial numbers, from drug use whether the drugs are legal or not. More deaths may overall result from the war on drugs, but for now at least it seems to me that more of the right people are doing the dying, and more of the people I want to see saved are being saved, than the alternative.
It's a shitty choice, like firebombing German civilians or nuking the Japanese in World War II. There's no good answer, but ultimately I would rather kill the other side to save (fewer) of the lives on my side, than pretend that I think all human life is of equal value to me. Maybe it should be, but it isn't.
Well, maybe you DO just let people use and die of overdoses.
Best idea I've heard in years. It will slowly cleanse the nation of genetic incompatables and chronic screwups. Pick up the dead bodies and take them to the city garbage dump each morning and celebrate the cleansing of America.
