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The White House announced a new Heroin Response Strategy on Monday to combat a "heroin/opioid epidemic" across 15 states in the northeast:
The Office of National Drug Control Policy said it would spend $2.5 million to hire public safety and public health coordinators in five areas in an attempt to focus on the treatment, rather than the punishment, of addicts. The funding — a sliver of the $25.1 billion that the government spends every year to combat drug use — will help create a new "heroin response strategy" aimed at confronting the increase in use of the drug. A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that heroin-related deaths had nearly quadrupled between 2002 and 2013.
[...] Once thought of as a drug used only by hard-core addicts, heroin has infiltrated many communities, largely because of its easy availability and its low price, officials said. The problem has become especially severe in New England, where officials have called for a renewed effort to confront it. Gov. Peter Shumlin of Vermont devoted his entire State of the State Message in January to what he called "a full-blown heroin crisis" in his state. Like the new White House effort, the governor called for a new, treatment-based approach to the drug.
[More after the break...]
Thomas McLellan, President Obama's chief scientist for drug control policy from 2009 to 2012, said $2.5 million "is not close to the financial commitment that is needed" and that use of the opiate-blocker naloxone is a squandered second chance without proper follow-up care. Executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, Ethan Nadelmann, was also dismissive of the announcement:
Nadelmann sees drug policy as existing along a continuum, from "lock'em up, hang'em, pull out their fingernails, Singapore, Saudi Arabia" all the way down to "essentially no controls whatsoever, maybe a little for kids." Unfortunately, he says, American drug policy under Obama is way too close to the hang'em end of the spectrum—and this new heroin program won't change the administration's position much in his eyes. That's because it's a bait-and-switch. It's promoted as a treatment-first program, but the details lean heavily toward enforcement and incarceration. It calls for 15 drug intelligence officers and 15 health policy analysts to collect data on overdoses and trends in heroin trafficking. Everyone will feed the data back to a joint health-law enforcement coordination center, which will distribute the data across state lines. That's great for cops. They need fresher leads on where heroin is coming from, who is moving it, and where it's being purchased. But public health officials don't need to know the intricacies of trafficking in order to respond to an ongoing epidemic.
According to a July 7th report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the rate of heroin-related overdose deaths nearly quadrupled from 2002 to 2013, with 8,200 deaths in the year 2013. During that period, heroin use increased the most among females (100%), the 18-25 age group (109%), and non-Hispanic whites (114%). Heroin use among households with less than $20,000 of annual income increased 62%, compared to 77% for households with $20,000-$49,999, and 60% for households with $50,000 or more. Tom Frieden, head of the CDC, said that the "epidemic" is growing out of prescription opioid painkiller abuse. He estimates that heroin is available at one-fifth the cost of prescription painkillers.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:23PM
Ask that question of somebody "close to the hang 'em end of the spectrum" and the answers will come in the form of availability and price and that sort of thing.
But from a less insane perspective, it seems pretty obvious that people aren't going to want to commit slow suicide through self-medication unless their lives are pretty shitty to begin with.
And the thing is...people who want to escape their lives through drugs pretty obviously don't have anything else left to lose or to live for or to care about. And when you've got an epidemic of that sort of depression on your hands, the last thing you should be worried about is the preferred means of escape used by the depressed.
Then again, the "hang 'em" crowd has their own problems they're dealing with...by making everybody else suffer and share the pain of their own insecurities. Gee, I wonder if there might be any correlation....
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Alfred on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:32PM
Only in comparison to the high the drugs give. My day to day life will never compare to a chemical high so it seems something to get depressed over when framed from the view of being high. (The only winning move is to not play.) When wanting to be somewhere else "better" than their normal life it is escapism, even if their normal life is coveted by others.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday August 19 2015, @06:58PM
That's pretty sad really. A chemical high may be more visceral but if it is actually better to the point you would prefer it at all times, something is very wrong.
A lot of people enjoy a mild buzz from alcohol (for example) but few want that all the time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:41PM
Legal and over-prescribed opioid painkillers are being identified as a "gateway" to the cheaper and easy-to-get heroin.
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(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday August 19 2015, @07:01PM
The people saying that have obviously never suffered real pain of any significant duration. Thus, they will happily tolerate the suffering of other people as long as it helps their agenda.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:27PM
Spoken like somebody who has no idea what they're talking about.