I really wish articles like this were not so necessary. I share it because it’s perfectly done. It gets boring saying the same things, but the story is the story. It doesn’t change, but it does get worse.
About The Author

BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Tough to watch!
Just like with the media, one gets drawn into the emotions … what is the message?
While it is true that much heroin comes from or through Mexico, the reason it’s so cheap is that the world market is flooded with Afghan heroin. That country is by far the largest producer of illicit opium, and for that we can thank the U.S. invasion. The Taliban had successfully banned opium cultivation, but now it’s the basis of the country’s economy.
The Taliban did not “successfully” ban opium production, and they only controlled part of the country even at their peak of power. This is a myth that people keep repeating.
The Taliban did “curtail” opium production in the areas they controlled, unless it served their interests not to curtail it.
And the CIA grew that Opium. Was that the real reason that we invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban?
The CIA never grows opium. Drug production just seems to materialize and increase when they get involved in certain regions of the world.
That’s the price of freedom.
A peculiar, US imposed by force form of freedom.
Is there any other kind?
Didn’t realize that Mexican heroin didn’t die out in the 1970s.
Still not seeing any rational proposals that have a chance of effectively addressing the issue. The drug market follows the rules of capitalism — the price of the tragedies always fall on the young and unfortunate.
That’s a fundamental thing not to understand on this issue, and don’t think it has nothing to do with Trump’s success.
I think it was more the 80’s but Mexican heroin did become much rarer around then. The current supply is a recent revival driven by the demands of all the people who got hooked on opiates in the past 20 years of lax prescribing.
Yes, that’s what I meant. Seemed to be a seventies thing and waned quickly after that. Until then heroin had been more of an east coast thing and wasn’t prominent in the west coast drug culture.
That may have been why Janis Joplin’s injected heroin OD in 1970 was so shocking. (Don’t know that it was Mexican heroin that she and her friend Nancy Gurley were using.)
By the mid-1980s there was a big push by pain management doctors and psychologists to loosen the restrictions on opiates for chronic pain patients.
Mexican heroin may have been a substitute opiate back then as well. The late sixties and early seventies trade was in SE Asian opium/heroin. The supply declined as the Vietnam War was gradually ended.
Folks who don’t understand the dynamics of addiction should watch “The Wire” . especially the first seasons.
People should watch The Wire for educational purposes, period.
Seems to me a big reason OD’s are happening is because of fentanyl. Makes the heroin cheaper (as fentanyl is cheaper than pure heroin), it’s much more powerful in potency than heroin, and users don’t know what is in their particular baggy that they bought.
And then of course restricting supply of the Oxy hasn’t had the intended effect, more like the opposite. Could be a lesson learned there…
We’d never adopt such sane measures here. But maybe we will; I hope I’m wrong:
Link
See the work of Gabor Mate in Canada.
These are the kinds of solutions I’m looking for when Booman says he wants the Feds to deal with this epidemic. However, as you stated earlier, I’m not optimistic we will see anyone brave enough to say, “The way we treat addiction in this country is as wrong as conservatives advocating for abstinence.” They’re too afraid (for good reason) of being susceptible to attacks that they don’t care about drugs getting into the hands of “our kids”. If Americans are stupid enough to go along with that, well, maybe we get the policy we deserve. But regardless of how effective such attacks might be, we need brave leaders advocating these solutions now.
HAT’s are progressive answers; working with libertarians to decriminalize drug use and reducing the reach of the police state is about as far as a “red-brown” alliance will take us. Actual working solutions will be up to us.
One of the few things that we know is that merchants of quickly consumed products don’t long survive without repeat customers and new customers aren’t created if there are no merchants.
At the street level, as the article pointed out, the merchants are in the biz to support their own addiction. I was surprised to learn in Mate’s work that addicts use the clinic because it’s safer than shooting up on the street. Suggests that at a certain point in addiction, it’s all about consuming the drug and not about the drug culture. Mate is an advocate for clinics supplying the drugs but has so far failed to succeed on that.
The problem is that making heroin cheaper will create more addicts. Opiate addiction is more dangerous with variable strength sources like homebrewed fentanyl mixes but it’s plenty dangerous even with stringently produced prescription pills.
It is very interesting to examine which drugs become problems in the US in light of US military activities overseas. And US diplomacy with corrupt governments.
It is also interesting to examine how economic hard times or economic good times track with drug use.
We have this significant issue because we have done almost everything wrong from a policy standpoint and when we have done something right it very soon gets defunded during a budget crisis.
Among other aspects of this issue, it is symptomatic of the jobs that are available on the black market in a time of recession and punitive action against people who were laid off. Go make your own job said the conservatives. Become an entrepreneur. So people did–in the black market.
And then there’s the “ethical” pharmaceutical industry that is cranking new and better legal pain-killers and apparently are not troubled by side-effects of addiction because it creates more revenue for them until a physician cuts off the prescription.
There are social institutions making the situation worse and at the same time thinking that shaming cures addiction. I think that we have enough evidence now to say that it doesn’t.
And opiate and amphetamine drug addiction is ravagaing rural America.
The moment someone figures out how to control the decisions of our friends and relatives, let me know.
Talk to this guy: Edward Bernays
If it didn’t work, corporations would not have spent billions on it for almost a century.
Yes, you might say that he’s the ultimate source of all evil permeating the world today. He took his grandfather’s genius and paired it with the devil. The cure is to buy more toothpaste and soap and whatever…Microsoft, Apple…on and on…
Before Freedom Fries (that only lasted a nano-second because even rocks recognized that it was stupid), there was Torches of Freedom.
I hadn’t heard about that before. But the list of such PR campaigns is endless and growing exponentially around the world. You might even say that a politician like HRC is a living product of the deception. Well, not might, she definitely is no more than a PR stunt.
True, but addicts are more like the people who read Adbusters.
Whatever makes you think that there’s a single profile for all or even most addicts?
This got me wondering how soon we’ll have printable narcotics. Apparently it won’t be long.
As long as addiction is considered different from disease, there will be criminal laws and social stigma attached to a medical problem, which just makes it worse.
Addiction to just about anything is a disease of the brain as real and physical as any other disorder. You can map it with a MRI or PET, and you can treat it with biological, psychological and social therapies.
Of course, when you have an entire extant industry to keep alive and profitable with the current status quo, don’t expect the right thing, expect the most profitable thing.
And round and round we go.