Why have opiate deaths spiked?
In the last half of 2016, fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, was detected in 56.3 percent of the opioid overdose deaths in the ten states that make up the CDC’s Enhanced State Opioid Overdose Surveillance program…
How do you solve this? You make available for purchase legal, reasonably priced, pure drugs. You make help getting off drugs available to anyone who wants it, free. (Tapering works in almost all cases.)
This is not a hard problem to solve. It is an easy problem to solve. It is also true that demonizing opiates, in particular, means that a lot of people don’t get the pain relief they need, especially chronic pain sufferers, whose nervous systems change over time so that they are more susceptible to pain.
We do not solve this problem because we are a bunch of moral hysterics who want to force our morals on other people, when their actions are less harmful than our prohibition is.
We also refuse to look at the actual cause of the opiate epidemic, which is fairly clearly economic despair and hopeless lives. Indeed, most drugs aren’t particularly addictive to people who have happy lives and things they want to do.
If you want to end at least half the deaths caused by opiate addiction, make it legally available (it will be more than half, because its illegality drives much of the behaviour that leads to death, beyond just adulteration.)
If you want people to get off opiates, create a society and economy which values them and treats them well. The policies to do this are fairly simple: Updated to deal with racism, sexism and environmental concerns, they are approximately the policies which ran the developed world in the post-war period until the ’70s. Tax the rich brutally, support high wages, have near-free tertiary education, make sure that jobs (or money) are so available that employers have to treat employees well, because employees who walk can always find another job.
This stuff can be complicated in the details, but it’s easy conceptually and hard only in the sense that you have to have the political will and to stay on top of it.
As for opiates and other drugs, just make them legal, regulate them, and make addiction treatment available.
The dead frustrating issue about most of our social problems is that the solutions are more or less known, we just don’t, actually, want to solve them. We prefer the problems to the solutions, or enough of us, combined with enough oligarchs, do.
We can fix our economy, our society, and our drug problem any time we want. Sadly, that is no longer true for the environment, but we can mitigate that damage.
Perhaps one day we’ll decide to do so. Much of this suffering is by choice, and as a society, we’re choosing it.
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