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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?
Portugal Cut Drug Addiction Rates in Half by Rejecting Criminalization
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:59PM (23 children)
Not 100% sure how serious this is, but the stupidity of people who DO take it seriously is off the charts.
So paying for heroin doses is bad, but paying almost $3 BILLION to fight the "drug war" which results in more negative outcomes is fine? Get your head out of your ass, your brain is lacking oxygen.
Don't come back with "I don't want to fund the DEA either" because otherwise you'd be making a massive stink about THAT all the time and I have yet to see any such thing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:17PM (18 children)
I can sympathize with his view. And there are more objections to this.
Consider hypothetically; 300k addicts in our population, however that is defined. With the current drug war policies the group has very poor outcomes in terms of, say, mortality at 10 years, or incarceration at 10 years, and so on. If you scrap the drug war and spend a small portion of the money to provide these people with heroin, their outlook is better. So from that outcome, great, right? But look closer. Will your policy mean *more* young people becoming addicted? (My gut feeling is that the answer is either no or yes but very small effect, but I don't really know.) If so, then that by itself might well be an overriding reason to not make the change - if your yardstick for policy is this diffuse sort of statistical analysis.
But that raises the question of whether that's the right yardstick to take in policy decisions. And there's a very good argument it's not. No matter which of these policies is adopted, it will benefit some and harm some unjustly. This sort of legislation arguably amounts to human experimentation, which is prohibited by international and national laws.
The only truly good solution is to get the state out of the issue entirely. End prohibition, and replace it with *nothing.*
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:26PM (15 children)
"Don't come back with "I don't want to fund the DEA either" because otherwise you'd be making a massive stink about THAT all the time and I have yet to see any such thing."
Dumbass didn't listen. It isn't about being on topic, it is about never seeing any objections to the DEA EVER except from other pinko-commie-leftist-SJWs who dislike having the highest prison population in the world.
You're an idiot then? The evidence is in but you still pussyfoot around like there is any debate left. War on Drugs is bad! Incarcerating people for drug use is stupid! Supplying people with heroin is leaps better for the whole society than having those addicts do other things to fund their addiction.
At least you've got the end prohibition part right, that would go a looong way to help the problem. I guess humanity has always been pretty selfish and shitty so I should stop being surprised by the lack of moral fiber from so many of you.
Removing the state from education has been BAD, removing mental health institutions was BAD, and basically every other attempt to remove society's safety nets have been BAD! There is no more debate here, just dragging you VIM types into reality.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:31PM (6 children)
When can I expect my check to pay for my tobacco?
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:33PM (4 children)
If your tobacco problem becomes so bad that hordes of idiots start committing crimes just to pay for their next pack? Well, then we should do something to minimize the crisis. Sadly your straw man doesn't really apply here.
However, I am all for some government run health facilities which would include rehabilitation programs. I wouldn't be happy paying for your cigarettes, but I would be happy paying for nicotine patches etc. Sadly heroin addiction is a lot more problematic and bridging the gap with a safe heroin / needle program to first stop the crimes and then help the people would be better.
Additionally, it seems that many heroin users are capable of performing a variety of jobs as long as they are getting their doses. So ultimately such a program would actually be more of a gain by keeping people employed as they struggle with their addiction.
The world isn't black and white, but the conlibertards can't quite figure that out. To be fair the tarderals have similar problems with the topics of racism and capitalism. As always the real path forward is somewhere in between the extremes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:55PM (3 children)
You being happy to pay isn't the problem.
The problem is you being happy to force me to pay.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday July 25 2018, @09:26PM (2 children)
Sometimes there's only a choice of evils. Which will you pay for: vaccinations, or horrible diseases? Firefighters, or damage from fires? Cops, or more crime? And if you think that you don't pay when someone else suffers disaster, think again. Prices jump when calamity strikes. We've seen that with oil, food, RAM, hard drives, and pretty much every commodity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @09:34PM (1 child)
Nobody denied your notion.
The problem is forcing people to pay rather than convincing them to pay.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @09:46PM
Hahahahaha, convince people to pay? People have their own problems and dreams and many of the services we RELY on would go unfunded as people work on building their private wealth. That is like saying "don't violently throw me in jail for murdering someone, just try and convince me to NOT murder instead!" That is so much retarded you've got there.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday July 26 2018, @12:09AM
Well, first you'll need to report for your mandatory inpatient tobacco rehab. Then you'll need to lose your job. Still sound good?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:35PM (7 children)
The libertarians won't STFU about ending the War on Drugs. DEA? Ha! They want to dismantle the entire goddamn federal government, and that's just for starters.
You've got your head up your arse mate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:25PM (6 children)
There seem to be many people here who are interested in confusing libertarianism for anarcho-capitalism.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:31PM (5 children)
The limit of libertarianism is necessarily capitalism, which is necessarily anarchy (which some call "anarcho-capitalism" in order to be clear that capitalism is the fundamental philosophy of society, not socialism, which can only work when built atop and therefore constrained by capitalism).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:16PM (4 children)
Then we must be clear what we mean by capitalism. Are we talking about the valuation of goods in a currency?
It sounds like we are also talking about property relations. By capitalism do we also mean exclusive ownership of property by a certain party? (Where a party may be any set of people, such as the set of Mondragon employees, the set of people who work a neighborhood vegetable garden for example, or the set of people who are citizens of a certain government.)
Are we also talking about a mode of production where ownership of the means of production is alienated from the operation of the means of production?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @09:59PM (3 children)
Capitalism is the philosophy that every resource should have a well defined owner; practicality demands that this applies only to a resource whose ownership comes into dispute, or could likely come into dispute.
This necessarily implies the need for a process to handle dispute resolution; in our current society, people mostly look to a government to provide the necessary structure for this process. However, such a process itself may be implemented under capitalism instead by placing the resources for this process under the same constraints as all other capital (e.g., the process cannot be funded by taxation, but rather must be funded by the participants' capital); ownership is defined by contracts to which parties in dispute agree in advance of future interaction; capitalism is an iterative process, one that may start at a point which is not perfect, and then be evolved by variation and selection. As all of society is the allocation of resources, then law is merely the collection of contracts. The system is stable when it is more profitable to work within that process rather than to ignore it.
Therefore, a notion such as the "means" of production is meaningless; there is no distinction between "Capitalist" and "Laborer"—everyone is a capitalist; everyone is the owner of some resource (such as his labor or his factory building or whatever). Individual owners (whether individual humans or corporations, etc.) interact according to the rules of their respective capital, as defined by contracts to which parties have agreed in advance, whose enforcement (whether violent or not) is by definition voluntary and specified in advance by the contracts themselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:03PM (2 children)
Dumbass.
Capitalism: ownership of the means of production, the "capital" if you will.
You use lots of words to explain really simple things, then tag on your ideology at the end like all the simple points somehow validate your ideas. They don't, your ideas fail in the real world without a structured system to base them on.
You want a series of contracts? Fine by me, but they will be enforced by the government. You want private enforcers? Get bent, you're obviously incapable of understanding any system larger than a dozen people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:38PM (1 child)
Get it yet, dumbass?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:54PM
You're too stupid for this discussion as usual. Piss off little TMB wannabe.
Ok I can't let you remain so dumb. The labor is only a means of production when paid by the owner of the factory. You may have had a point back in the day when raw materials could be collected and processed by hand like moccasins and home spun clothing. In the age of mechanization labor is owned by the capitalists by paying the peon to work. A nicer form of slavery with just enough of an opening where some idiot such as yourself can believe the lie "well anyone can bootstrap themselves and compete! they're just laaaazzzyyyy!!!"
Seriously, you're too dumb for this entire topic. I doubt it is a genetic handicap so there is hope for you yet.
(Score: 4, Informative) by NewNic on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:11PM (1 child)
Portugal. Look it up.
Anywhere that drugs have been legalized (or even de-criminalized), the outcomes have been positive.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday July 26 2018, @04:31PM
"Positive ? You mean positive growth of my profits, right ?" - anonymous major US campaign donor
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @06:29PM (2 children)
Have you heard of the Libertarian Party [lp.org]? They don't want to fund the DEA. See here [lp.org]:
GP sounds like a libertarian or anarcho-capitalist.
Perhaps you're relying too heavily on the media to construct your knowledge of external reality?
But I understand where you're coming from. The media doesn't want to tell you anything about any political candidates that aren't Red Team Blue Team, and if they have to, they'll make sure to use the same tactics used by Project Veritas to make sure you walk away with a negative impression.
If we want the DEA dissolved, The Libertarian Party and the Green Party [gp.org] are the way to go. Chances are, the Libertarian Party and Green Party will be on the ballot in most states in the USA this November.
I should mention that the Libertarian Party and Green Party have engaged in joint initiatives to increase media access during elections. However, there is only so much we can expect from those efforts, given the fact that all of our media is owned by just a few guys. Our only immediate option for getting the information we need to have is to regard the mainstream media as the only truly "fake news" and find alternative news sources, such as Common Dreams and World Socialist Web Site, to name two that publish regularly and have also been punished by the all-mighty Oracle at Google presumably in the name of "fake news." (Also other sources like NORML's blag are good to check once per week or so.)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:25PM (1 child)
I've got no problem with the sane libertarians, there are just so many that take the ideology to extremes that would regress society.
Quite simply there are things best left to government bodies and things best left to private interests. The good of society requires certain prohibitions and programs instead of total freedom. The data is in, Drug War bad and if you want to prevent small time violence and crime then a program to provide people with their heroin dose is ideal. No one wants to be addicted to drugs so the worries about some explosion of heroin use is just stupid. Most people will keep their addictions to themselves instead of going into a government building to somewhat publicly display their choices.
Tell me, which public programs do the moderate libertarians believe in?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @05:33AM
They're also for open immigration and against tariffs. Or at least were 30 years ago (I don't follow politics).
I think this can be safely said about any ideological group. Go over to reddit and you'll find many groups that want to immediately end western civilization, full stop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:47PM
Doing it right is more costly than doing it easily.