America’s Head-Scratching Approach in Fighting Addiction

If society is judged by how we treat our most vulnerable, America is failing miserably. We’re struggling with the basic pillars of a healthy society. In large swaths of the country, we’re failing to educate students and pay workers a living wage, let alone provide an aging population with basic healthcare services.

Growing levels of dysfunction have caused societal ills and harm across this country. In sickness, some will inevitably turn to drugs. Combine access to deadly drugs, with poor mechanisms to treat addiction, and you have a full-blown crisis.

For those familiar with the San Francisco Bay area’s open-air drug scenes, it was only a matter of time before the perils of drug use spilled over into the general population.

While playing in a California park, a 10-month-old baby may have accidentally ingested, and nearly overdosed on fentanyl. This is according to the infant’s parents, paramedics, and observers on the scene.

How could this happen?

Those familiar with crawling toddlers know full well, anything on the floor will almost certainly end up on their hands and eventually in their mouths. Fentanyl is currently the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States, and dosages in micrograms can be fatal. The drug floats around in powder form, so it isn’t inconceivable that some residue can end up on a playground, and potentially in a child’s system.

The flood of fentanyl, combined with widening drug use in the public square, makes for an increased risk of accidental ingestion and potential overdoses.

Fentanyl, in powder form anyway, is exclusively imported. Not one gram is manufactured stateside. In an effort to increase potency and decrease the price, drug lords add fentanyl to heroin. Lackluster government intervention — in regards to smuggling and usage — only exacerbates the situation.

Some will simply throw their hands up and concede; addiction is too difficult or complex a problem for public officials to take on, let alone solve. But that’s simply not true; policymakers have both the tools and authority to mitigate the opioid epidemic. There’s also precedent for a public health response to a drug problem.

Smoking bans

Those of a certain age can remember a time when people smoked cigarettes practically everywhere. People smoked in their offices, while they were out to lunch, in banks, shopping malls, courtrooms, and even hospitals.

America was one big smoking section. Cigarette smoke was unavoidable. People smoked on planes, trains, and of course, automobiles. Ash trays were a feature of any and every seat you could assume.

Slowly, then suddenly, that all came to an end thanks to public health officials, including the Surgeon General, as well as private medical practitioners.

Everyone was on the same page. Smoking had become such a problem, not only for the direct consumer, but for non-smokers in their general vicinity. The problem required drastic and immediate action.

It was dubbed The Great American Smokeout; a national campaign beginning in the early 1970s designed to change American attitudes towards smoking, and implement smoke-free laws, all in an effort to cut cancer rates and save lives. According to Statista: From 1965 to 2019, the prevalence of cigarette smoking in the U.S. decreased from about 42 percent to 14 percent.

That’s not by accident or coincidence. Smoking was banned indoors, and in the case of perimeters around hospitals and health facilities, even outdoors. Public health officials made it extremely difficult or inconvenient for people to light up in public. To no one’s surprise, eventually, a lot less people smoked.

Contrast our public health response to smoking with our approach to opioids, heroin, or fentanyl. In some areas, open drug scenes — near schools or playgrounds — are left unchecked.

At a minimum, our public health and law enforcement officials should ensure that ever-deadlier drugs are kept as far away as possible from children. Discrepancies in messaging by public health officials, when we compare heroin and cigarettes are truly mind-blowing. Rather than treating addiction, facilities help illicit drug users check their drugs for purity. While needle exchange programs do help in minimizing disease risk, they also do nothing to decrease drug usage. While these approaches keep some from overdosing, they do nothing to curb public drug use or addiction.

In the battle against illicit opioids, public health officials are low on ideas and short on solutions. Yet when it comes to cigarettes, the campaign simply continues. Recently, there was a push to limit nicotine in cigarettes.

The Great American Smokeout goes on.

On the opioid crisis, we seem to be hitting a proverbial wall. We’re taking the wrong approach in seeking solutions, and should seek the solutions which worked in curbing smoking. It should be difficult and inconvenient to use narcotics.

Only a few months ago, Congress took steps to stop fentanyl from coming in via the postal service. We need to continue pushing in this direction and make smuggling this toxin practically impossible. Pass laws against the production of fentanyl and ensure the few countries that do produce it understand the consequences of continuing to do so.

A few days ago, the Biden administration added the first ever non-fatal overdose database. This will allow for a real-time response to the hardest areas, allowing for quicker deployment of resources.

When it comes to the users themselves, we can benefit from more programs that discourage usage, and slowly phase out test strips and needle exchanges. The goal shouldn’t be a safer high, but better ways to stop. Be it temporary housing, job programs, or even cash for going clean.

When a societal problem appears contained — overdoses are only impacting drug users — the general public doesn’t seem to care. Only when it spills over do we take notice. Yes, that’s shameful, but it’s also an opportunity. Let’s hope we get it right.