It's an Epidemic (don't panic)
The views expressed here are my own and are not necessarily shared by any employer or educational institution I may be affiliated with...but they probably should be.
Epidemic! Such an exciting word! Brings up images from history and horror movies of bodies in the street and society on the brink of collapse. Fingers have been pointing for years to find who to blame. Do we blame the doctors for filling medicine cabinets across the country with oxi and perc 30s? Or do we blame the drug companies who made billions supplying pill mills with unlimited product which then ended up on the streets? Do we blame the war in Afganistan for modernization of heroin production and distribution that has flooded the streets with so much heroin that some days it's cheaper than booze? We could always go back to blaming the addicts, but that thankfully is getting harder and harder to do. Now that heroin has found its way from poor inner city neighborhoods to wealthy suburbs and rural white comminuities it's harder for politicians to slap "other" status on the dealers and consumers of heroin and write it off as "somebody else's problem." Here on the east coast it's hard to find someone who hasn't lost a close friend or family member to heroin overdose, and some have lost more than one. In truth it doesn't matter who we blame. Blame has been as useful to a person fighting this epidemic as an anchor is to a person tryinging to swim the English Channel. It's something best left behind so we can focus on the task at hand.
Yes things are bad, it might even be that we haven't seen the worst of it, but this epidemic is treatable. We already have what we need to handle the situation. We just need to stop panicking.
The war on drugs has lasted about 100 years. 100 years ago people panicked and decided to turn a small number of functioning addicts into criminals. Panic has driven drug policy since then to increasingly draconian measures on the mistaken belief that the problem is heroin itself or what ever drug du jour we are afraid of. Panic has driven us to wage was on cartels, arrest heads of state, and fill our jails so full that we now imprision more people than any other country in the world. Panic has driven us to treat an epidemic like an invading force rather than a disease and by doing so we've waged war against our fellow citizens. It's time to stop panicking. These panicked attempts to rid the world of heroin have brought us to where we are now. More people addicted to heroin, more people overdosing on heroin, more people dying from heroin than ever before.
We need to stop and take a breath. There are two medications with a proven track record in treating opiate addiction, Methadone and to a lesser extent Suboxone. We need to educate addiction professionals on the effectiveness of these treatments and stop acting as if they are as bad as heroin. We need to stop using prisons as the treatment option of choice for all addicts. We need to open our minds to any treatment modality that helps the addicted person return to the human experience rather than judge them for not recovering the way we want them to. We need to stop trying to punish the afflicted back to health.
For a history of the drug war and the damage its fear based policies have done to the world and to the treatment of addiction I recommend Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, by Johann Hari.
Blame, sin, punishment, they are all part of the response according to conventional wisdom. As you say, better solutions, or actual solutions are at hand.
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