Opioid-Related Deaths

[ER]

According to a 2019 study undertaken by the RAND Corporation on behalf of The Police Executive Research Forum, on an average day 130 Americans will die of opioid overdoses.

I was thinking that if you multiply that figure by 365, you wind up with 47,150 deaths annually. To put that horrific statistic into perspective, the number of US combat deaths in ten years of the Vietnam War is officially given as 58,220.

I don't know what the answer is to the opioid plague, or if there is an answer, addiction does lie in some people's DNA, but clearly whatever it is we have been doing is not working. Maybe if the US would fund addiction-treatment programs to the extent it has traditionally funded incarceration, this could save lives.

This is insanity, and as I told my US Representative in an email I sent him this morning, we need to try something else.


https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR3000/RR3064/RAND_RR3064.pdf

[Rev. Powell]

I have friends/acquaintances who have been addicts---all recovered currently as far as I know.

I believe more and better treatment is the only solution.

Easy access to opioids in the early 2000s created a lot more addicts... but when they suddenly cracked down on access to prescribed drugs, addicts flocked to more dangerous alternatives like heroin and eventually fentanyl derivatives. Overdoses shot up. Sort of a Catch-22, but I prefer more addicts on safer substances and fewer deaths.

Of course, it's possible that the current epidemic will eventually subside and the opiate problem will return to previous levels. But I think the Portuguese model makes the most sense. Hard drugs are illegal to sell but possession for personal use is a misdemeanor, resulting in fines or referral to treatment.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radical-drugs-policy-is-working-why-hasnt-the-world-copied-it

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/greenwald_whitepaper.pdf

I would say it will never happen here, but when I was younger I never dreamed America would see legal weed someday, so maybe things just move very slowly here.