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This Bold Plan to Fight Opioid Overdoses Could Save Lives--But Some Conservatives Think It's "Immoral"
With Ohio beset by a massive public health around opioid use and overdoses--more than 4,000 Ohioans died of opioid overdoses in 2016--the Cleveland Plain Dealer sent travel editor Susan Glaser to Amsterdam in search of innovative approaches to the problem. While there, she rediscovered Holland's long-standing, radical, and highly effective response to heroin addiction and properly asked whether it might be applied to good effect here.
The difference in drug-related death rates between the two countries is staggering. In the U.S., the drug overdose death rate is 245 per million, nearly twice the rate of its nearest competitor, Sweden, which came in second with 124 per million. But in Holland, the number is a vanishingly small 11 per million. In other words, Americans are more than 20 times more likely to die of drug overdoses than the Dutch.
For Plain Dealer readers, the figures that really hit home are the number of state overdose deaths compared to Holland. Ohio, with just under 12 million people, saw 4,050 drug overdose deaths in 2016; the Netherlands, with 17 million people, saw only 235.
What's the difference? The Dutch government provides free heroin to several score [where a score=20] hardcore heroin addicts and has been doing so for the past 20 years. Public health experts there say that in addition to lowering crime rates and improving the quality of life for users, the program is one reason overdose death rates there are so low. And the model could be applied here, said Amsterdam heroin clinic operator Ellen van den Hoogen.
[...]"It's not a program that is meant to help you stop," acknowledged van den Hoogen. "It keeps you addicted."
That's not a sentiment sits well with American moralizers, such as George W. Bush's drug czar, John Walters, whom Glaser consulted for the story. He suggested that providing addicts with drugs was immoral and not "real treatment," but he also resorted to lies about what the Dutch are doing.
He claimed the Dutch are "keeping people addicted for the purpose of controlling them" and that the Dutch have created "a colony of state-supported, locked-up addicts."
Your humble Ed (who rechopped the quoting, so head off to the full article(s) to see the full story) adds: of course, this is quite a contentious issue, digging deep into moralistic debate, and where clearly there's little agreed-upon objective truth and plenty of opinions. However, we are a community dotted widely round the globe, and so I'm sure there are plenty of stories of what has or has not worked in different locales.
Previous: Tens or Hundreds of Billions of Dollars Needed to Combat Opioid Crisis?
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(Score: 2) by crafoo on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:11PM (11 children)
The USA is not Denmark. There is no reason to believe emulating them will produce successful results in the USA unless you are also going to transplant their culture and demographics at the same time. I doubt the majority of Dutch people taking heroin are even doing it for the same reasons as people in the USA.
Still, I'm pro drug legalization. All drugs. Actually, I believe they already should be legal except for gross government over-reach.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:18PM (4 children)
Dutch people are not Danish people. Dutch people live in Holland and Danish people live in Denmark.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:37PM (3 children)
Dutch people do not necessarily live in Holland. Holland is in the Netherlands, but the Netherlands is/are not in Holland.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:16PM
We all know Netherlands is where Peter Pan and Tinkerbell live ...
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:24PM
Find a Computer Industry Job in...
... The Netherlands
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:26AM
To be precise, Holland consists of two provinces of the Netherlands.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:03PM
I spent the Summer of 1993 at CERN in Geneva.
While it's true that every Swiss citizen possesses a fully-automatic rifle, they're the property of the Swiss Army.
I never saw any evidence of a gun culture of any sort, let alone such as we have here in These United States.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Touché) by Thexalon on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:31PM (1 child)
I was wondering when this argument was going to be trotted out.
You're saying this in nice polite language, but what you really mean is "I don't wanna pay for heroin for blacks and Hispanics". Never mind that based on the OD statistics heroin users are disproportionately white and rural, which makes heroin users more like the Dutch or Danes than the US population as a whole. So not only are you being racist, you're wrong on your facts.
As for why people are addicted to heroin, in the US the most common reason is over-prescription of opioid painkillers. Which may be related to the fact that another major chemical source of pain relief, cannabis, is illegal. Which is less of an issue in the Netherlands, since cannabis is sometimes legal there, and thus odds are more of their addicts became addicted due to recreational drug use rather than medical drug use.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @05:43AM
Not to be a dick here, just looking at this as rationally as possible..
He didn't say that at all, veiled or bluntly. But you did, bluntly. You effectively put words in his mouth, and then built the rest of your rebuttal around the words he didn't say but you say he said. That's not very good debating. I think there's a term for it.
My personal opinion is that the OD statistics you quote aren't wrong, and we should approach the problem from that starting point. Since it agrees with me I feel no need to verify by checking facts on it. I'm as human as anyone that way. But lets keep the outright logical fallacies out of the debating, eh? We've had several thousand years of written history to figure those out. It's time to shit-can them and actually get something accomplished when we discuss issues.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:53PM (2 children)
Ah crafoo the closet racist. Tell me, what is your rationale for believing that what worked for one group of humans won't work for another? Last time I checked heroin use was a pretty standard thing with the same effects across all societies.
You think Dutch people do heroin for what then? Not the escape of a drug high? Hmmmm, I smell a bullshit artist who thinks he's Michelangelo.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:58PM (1 child)
He wants to say "nigger" but he's too much of a chickenshit to say it, and/or he thinks he's fooling the rest of us that he's not actually a racist because he doesn't outright say the word.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:17PM
Yeah, but now he'll pull the persecution card saying "all you SJWs are the same just call people racist if they don't agree with you!"
Sadly he didn't use explicit enough language to be called out as a racist. These days the bigots are so OFFENDED by being called "racist" because they truly don't think that is the cause. They'll point to behaviors, cultural differences, all sorts of things that get divided along racial lines yet they aren't racist.
Crafoo seems stuck on stage one of grief, but as a country the US seems like a blend between steps 1-4 (denial, guilt, anger, depression). I'd say the most average US person is stuck on #2, guilt. They know shits fucked up, they realize minorities have a real problem with discrimination and these people feel back about it. A good portion have moved on to anger, some angry about the situation and a large minority angry that there even is a problem. The last group are the Trumpettes, proclaiming there is no more racism and that nazis don't exist in the US, it is more like a combination of steps 1 and 3 because they couldn't own up to #2.
I'm hoping that Trump gets the boot and we can continue with steps 5,6,7. Upward turn, reconstruction, and finally widespread acceptance and hope for a better future. It is gonna be a tough time though with people such as crafoo digging in their heels and ignoring reality in favor of hate propaganda.