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posted by martyb on Friday August 11 2017, @11:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-say-emergency dept.

After some initial confusion about the White House's plans earlier in the week, President Trump has followed the recommendation of the President's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, headed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and declared the opioid crisis to be a national emergency. He has promised to spend "a lot" of time, effort, and money to combat the problem:

Among the other recommendations were to rapidly increase treatment capacity for those who need substance abuse help; to establish and fund better access to medication-assisted treatment programs; and to make sure that health care providers are aware of the potential for misuse and abuse of prescription opioids by enhancing prevention efforts at medical and dental schools.

President Trump also decried a slowdown in federal prosecutions of drug crimes and a reduction in sentence lengths. Activists and policy experts are wary of an enforcement-heavy approach:

Bill Piper, senior director for the Drug Policy Alliance, told CNN Tuesday that stricter enforcement "has never worked" and the President would be "better focusing on the treatment side of things." "A supply side approach to drugs has never worked," Piper said. "That is what has been tried for decades and it has failed for every drug it has applied to, including alcohol during Prohibition. As long as there has been and[sic] demand for drugs, there will be a supply." Trump would not be the first administration to crack down on drug use by focusing on enforcement, but Piper said doing so would play into a desire to "sound tough," not actually solve the problem. "It makes it look like they are doing something even when they are not," Piper said.

Trump also advocated for more abstinence-based treatment to combat the opioid crisis. "The best way to prevent drug addiction and overdose is to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first place. If they don't start, they won't have a problem. If they do start, it's awfully tough to get off," Trump said. That sort of strategy advocates for targeting kids and young adults with anti-drug messaging, evocative of the "Just Say No" ad campaign of the 1980s and early 1990s.

This crisis is serious, folks:

"It is a serious problem the likes of which we have never had. You know when I was growing up, they had the LSD and they had certain generations of drugs. There's never been anything like what's happened to this country over the last four or five years. And I have to say this in all fairness, this is a worldwide problem, not just a United States problem. This is happening worldwide. But this is a national emergency, and we are drawing documents now to so attest."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @02:16PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12 2017, @02:16PM (#552848)

    The synthetic ones are can be more dangerous than the real thing. If they dispensed pure heroin, you'd have a valid point. Unfortunately drug dealers don't care about the quality of what they supply, so could be contaminated with who know what, or even something else entirely.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:14PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday August 12 2017, @06:14PM (#552917) Journal

    Heroin [wikipedia.org] is synthetic:

    Heroin was first made by C. R. Alder Wright in 1874 from morphine, a natural product of the opium poppy.

    [...] Heroin is derived from opium through a process involving various chemicals such as acetone and acetic anhydride.

    [...] Diamorphine was first synthesized in 1874 by C. R. Alder Wright, an English chemist working at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London. He had been experimenting with combining morphine with various acids. He boiled anhydrous morphine alkaloid with acetic anhydride for several hours and produced a more potent, acetylated form of morphine, now called diacetylmorphine or morphine diacetate.

    Heroin is about two times more potent than morphine. Fentanyl [wikipedia.org] is up to 100 times more potent than morphine, with some of its analogues, like carfentanil [wikipedia.org], being even more potent.

    --
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