Another Epidemic

I think using recreational drugs (except for ethyl alcohol in moderation) is a bad idea and have never used them (except for ethyl alcohol usually in moderation).  I would prefer that others avoid them as well. However I am aware that my preferences in no way affect the rights of other adults to do as they like in this matter. Neither do the preferences of anyone else, including the preferences of people who happen to be employed by the government.  A meaningful  belief in liberty must include a belief in the right of people to make choices, take actions, and hold opinions others of us may see as wrong or self-destructive.  If an adult wants to use cocaine, tobacco, marijuana, opioids, meth, or whatever, it is his business and not my business  or the rightful business of any government officials to stop him forcibly.  This is a minority opinion held mainly by liberals, libertarians, and probably a bunch of dopers of varying political persuasions.  Most people seem to favor prohibition of one thing or another.

This is despite the fact that prohibition, whether of alcohol in the 1920s or of various drugs since then, has both failed to stop people from using the things that were prohibited and had awful side effects for both the users and suppliers of the banned products and the general public – including the corruption of public officials, the rise of vicious and dangerous criminal organizations, huge costs to taxpayers, and violations  of everyone’s rights and privacy.  One obvious reason for the popularity of prohibition is that prohibition agents benefit from prohibition and have incentives to convince others  to support it. Contrary to some people’s myths, government officials usually are not disinterested humanitarians. They have economic interests in their jobs and careers and personal interests in preserving and increasing their power over their fellow citizens. It is a common and often effective trick of politicians and bureaucrats to trump up  and drum up a crisis to scare the public into giving them more money and power.  It is not unfair cynicism to  wonder about the similarities in timing  between claims of a new opioid crisis now as the marijuana prohibition horse seems to be on its last legs and  the  reefer madness  scare being pushed  in the early 1930s when alcohol prohibition was  on its last legs.

People in the traditional media certainly have gone along with the theme of an opioid crisis.  Almost all stories are scare stories, with many going beyond “crisis” all the way to “epidemic” in their descriptions of the situation.  The number of deaths reported as being  by overdose  from or at least involving opioids  has increased in fifteen years  from about three per hundred thousand Americans in 2000 to about ten per hundred thousand  Americans in 2015, according to the government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With information  of this sort there are always questions about whether and to what degree things  such as differences over time in methods  of collecting and reporting  data  and  changing definitions of terms (such as “involved”) might have influenced or distorted the results.  However even if one takes the report at face value, that is one death caused by or connected with the use of opioids per ten thousand people.  Additionally misusing  opioids is neither contagious  nor something striking people in large numbers apparently at random. Those  who choose not to use the drugs are not at risk of coming down with the affliction.  This is not an epidemic in the usual sense of the term, and calling it one is at least confusing the issue and perhaps irresponsible fear mongering.

Regardless of that, misusing opioids is bad business, and there are many who are doing it.  It would be  good  to treat this as a medical and  public health problem and try to help people whose abuse of opioids is harming them and to do  a better job of letting people know the risks of using these drugs as a way of persuading them not to start.  That would be a far better way of handling the problem than being panicked into sending  the  drug warriors  off on a new or stepped up campaign  when their others have been distinguished so often by spectacular, expensive failure and really bad collateral damage.