Lessening the Opioid Crisis, Helping Addicts

This week marks the anniversary of two high-profile drug-related deaths of artists. On February 2nd, 1979, Sex Pistols guitarist Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose in Greenwich Village, NJ. Thirty-five years later on the same day, Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died of an accidental drug overdose, also in New York. (Sid Vicious image source: https://www.biography.com/people/sid-vicious-246010)

Drug use, drug addiction, and drug overdose are nothing new, of course. Remember the crack epidemic of the 1980's? In 1971 President Nixon launched a war on drugs that would continue for decades. We know now that the drug war did little to stem drug use, and mostly managed to throw lots of people into prison.  

We now find ourselves in the midst of an arguably preventable opioid crisis. Preventable because, it has been revealed, major drug distributors hired away Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) lawyers and got those lawyers to help them draft new legislation that would weaken the DEA's ability to successfully prosecute the distributors for flooding the market with prescription narcotics like fentanyl. Deaths from these legal drugs have skyrocketed. The new Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act was signed into law by President Obama in April 2016. In other words, this is a crisis of our own making. This echoes some speculation that the crack epidemic of the 1980s was facilitated by actions of the CIA in a drug-sales-for-gun-purchases arrangement with the Contra army in Nicaragua. (This, and the fate of journalist Gary Webb who wrote the article "Dark Alliance" about the CIA's role in the crack explosion, were the subject of the movie "Kill the Messenger".) The word 'epidemic' gets thrown around a lot, but in this case I think it fits. 

So how do we fix this? Various suggestions have been proposed. Here are mine.

(1) Change the law back. If the new law has made it "virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies, according to internal agency and Justice Department documents", which "had allowed the [DEA] to immediately prevent drugs from reaching the street" then fix that. Give the DEA its teeth back.

(2) Get addicts the detox they need. Detox covers the first 5-7 days of stopping using a drug, and it's a critical period. Some drugs are physically harder to stop using than others. Heroin, as most people know, has a very nasty detox. Alcohol and marijuana detoxes are also unpleasant. Cocaine detox? Very few physical side effects. (Mental & emotional reactions are another issue.) Having an addict spend a week at an inpatient detox facility (e.g., in a hospital) can help tremendously, and facility staff can be available 24/7 during this time should any medical problems arise.  


(3) Get addicts the ongoing treatment they need. Since many addicts also have addictive personalities, ongoing resources -- for weeks, months, years -- are important. Twelve-step programs like Narcotics Anonymous can be tremendously useful in connecting addicts with other recovering addicts who 'get it'. An added bonus? It's basically free. (Similar to church service, a basket gets passed for a suggested $1 donation to cover expenses like coffee. But contributing isn't mandatory.) (NA logo image source: http://southbrowardna.org/)