June 05, 2014
They were
ferociously disciplined, in mind and body. But they couldn’t conquer heroin.
Jeffrey
Reynolds and Mark Kennedy, former Navy SEALs, provided security
for the Maersk Alabama. In
February, in Seychelles,
both died from lethal cocktails of heroin and alcohol.
In their home
country, smack is enjoying an unnerving revival. Two weeks before Reynolds and
Kennedy died, acclaimed character actor Philip Seymour
Hoffman fatally overdosed on a combination of narcotics that included
heroin. Since then:
• The
New York Times reported that the
“amount of heroin seized by the Police Department on Staten
Island has jumped more than 300 percent from 2011 to 2013, and this year shows
no sign of abating.” (In its coverage of Hoffman’s death, the Times wrote that Gotham
was “awash in cheap heroin.”)
• A strategy
developed by the police department in Taunton,
Massachusetts revealed that the city was “on track to have more heroin
overdoses in the first three months of the year than we had in the entire year of
2013.”
• Noting that
many Old Dominion municipalities could “see double the number of heroin overdose
deaths over last year,” 12
Virginia fedpols asked the state’s governor to establish a task force.
• Law-enforcement
officers in the Pittsburgh region arrested dozens of heroin dealers who had
“brazenly conducted most of their drug trafficking in the Monroeville
business district.”
• Commenting
on his state’s heroin crisis, Ohio
Attorney General Mike DeWine said, “We’ve never seen anything like it. It’s
unprecedented. We’ve never had as lethal a drug as available, and as cheap.”
• East
Baton Rouge Parish’s coroner told
KNOE 8 News that so far, 2014’s deaths from heroin are double what they
were on the same date in 2013.
• A lengthy
examination by The Courier-Journal
reported that in 2011, “just one person was booked on heroin trafficking
charges in Louisville
… . By the next year, the number was 53, and by 2013 it was 71. … Through the
first week of May, 100 people had already been booked on charges of heroin
trafficking this year.”
• An Associated Press
investigation found that heroin has spread to “postcard villages in Vermont, middle-class enclaves outside Chicago,
the sleek urban core of Portland,
Ore., and places in between and
beyond.”
As odd as it
sounds, the heroin epidemic gripping much of the nation is largely the result
of a “success.” According to Caleb
Banta-Green, author of a 2013 analysis
for the University of Washington’s
Alcohol & Drug Abuse Institute,
“when we reined in opiate prescribing, it dried up the market for diverted
prescription pharmaceuticals, and the people who were abusing prescription
pharmaceuticals switched over to heroin.”
Recent years
have seen doctors, prompted by addicts and government restrictions, cut back on
painkillers. And in April 2013, the FDA decreed that the original formula for OxyContin
be “withdrawn from sale,” and that only a reengineered version, “more difficult
to crush, break, or dissolve,” was legal. Some junkies turned to other pills, such
as Opana. Many found
something cheaper -- and far more dangerous.
“Win” a battle
in the “War on Drugs,” and a new front pops up. That’s always been the case,
because, as a sitcom
character trenchantly observed, “Dude, drugs don’t need pushing. They push
themselves. People love drugs.”
But with the
exception of marijuana, where sane reforms are proliferating at the state
level, get-tough nonsense dominates. What the Cato Institute’s Tim Lynch wrote in 2001 is true
in 2014: “America’s drug
policies are never seriously debated in Washington.
Year after year, our elected representatives focus on two questions: How much
more money should we spend on the drug war? and, How should it be spent? In the
months preceding elections, politicians typically try to pin blame for the drug
problem on one another. After the election, the cycle begins anew.”
Last month,
the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control held a hearing on heroin
and prescription-drug addiction. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) pledged to “maintain
the current law enforcement tools to go after those who are trafficking heroin
into our nation and our communities.” Witnesses were the usual drug-war drones,
including officials from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Drug Enforcement
Administration, Office of National Drug Control Policy, and Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration. New, bold, promising ideas for combating
the scourge of heroin? The federal government’s not interested.
Meanwhile, the
bodies pile up, cartels’ and dealers’ turf wars rage, police
and prosecutors continue to get paychecks, and America maintains a prohibition
that cannot succeed.
D. Dowd Muska (www.dowdmuska.com) writes about government, economics, and technology. Follow him on Twitter @dowdmuska.
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