#5 Democratic Party Principles
Opioid "Crisis"
Did you ever wonder where this new pestilence of opioid deaths came from?
Did it come to surface the way the Black plague does, occasionally, with a reservoir of disease living in fleas which live on rats?
Or did we invent it?
Or was it always there, but nobody noticed until it was not just Black inner city kids dying but beloved White suburban kids?
I do not know the answers to this question.
I do know that if we really want to address the two separate problems of 1/ Drug addiction 2/ Opioid overdose deaths, we will need to make some basic choices, not just use ban-aides.
We will first have to decriminalize drug abuse and treat this problem as a public health problem.
We will have to commit billions to the part of the health care system which treats drug addiction, just as we devote resources to the treatment of other life long problems like diabetes and alcohol addiction.
We will have to ask the hard questions we ask of all medical therapies and programs: What is the evidence they work? What better solutions might be out there.
Right now, we've got programs which work to keep people "clean" only for as long as the patients remain in the programs, but the relapse (recidivism) rate is nearly 100%
Opioid "Crisis"
Did you ever wonder where this new pestilence of opioid deaths came from?
Did it come to surface the way the Black plague does, occasionally, with a reservoir of disease living in fleas which live on rats?
Or did we invent it?
Or was it always there, but nobody noticed until it was not just Black inner city kids dying but beloved White suburban kids?
I do not know the answers to this question.
I do know that if we really want to address the two separate problems of 1/ Drug addiction 2/ Opioid overdose deaths, we will need to make some basic choices, not just use ban-aides.
We will first have to decriminalize drug abuse and treat this problem as a public health problem.
We will have to commit billions to the part of the health care system which treats drug addiction, just as we devote resources to the treatment of other life long problems like diabetes and alcohol addiction.
We will have to ask the hard questions we ask of all medical therapies and programs: What is the evidence they work? What better solutions might be out there.
Right now, we've got programs which work to keep people "clean" only for as long as the patients remain in the programs, but the relapse (recidivism) rate is nearly 100%
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