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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 18 2015, @09:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the will-it-help-or-hinder? dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday August 19 2015, @12:18AM

    by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Wednesday August 19 2015, @12:18AM (#224694)

    This isn't a fundamental right.

    Incorrect. Without the right to control your own body, you barely have rights at all.

    Show me where it is stated in the constitution that you have the right to use drugs and I'll reconsider my point of view.

    Yet another person who is utterly ignorant of how the constitution works. Unless the constitution grants the government a certain power, it simply does not have that power. The constitution does not grant rights like you believe. The federal prohibition is utterly unconstitutional.

    And even if the constitution *did* work that way, that would just mean it would need to change. I don't need a document to tell me what freedoms I should have because I am not a mindless drone. If your society infringes upon rights you believe you should have, the solution is not to mindlessly obey; it is to change society. It seems you would prefer to appeal to the status quo, but nothing ever changes that way.

    People regularly die as a result of ODing on heroine.

    Once you start speaking of safety as being more important than fundamental freedoms, you have already failed. In 'the land of the free and the home of the brave', safety is not more important than freedom. I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees. But it seems cowardice is common. What a shame.

    There's no good reason why anybody should be shooting up with heroine or smoking crack.

    You don't need a good reason to be allowed to do something. You don't get to decide that for others.

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