OPINION:
The use and abuse of illegal and dangerous drugs is at a crisis moment in America. It is made doubly worse by our apathy toward and coddling of it.
To give a sense of the extent of this crisis, consider that over 110,000 Americans died from such drug use last year. The bulk of those deaths were of people under age 50.
More Americans under 50 died from drug poisonings last year than all Americans under 50 died from COVID-19 in three years; more adolescents died from drug poisoning last year than all children from COVID-19 in three years.
If we need a visual, consider two commercial airliners crashing into each other every single day in America. The largest football stadium in North America, at the University of Michigan, still seats fewer Americans than died from illegal and dangerous drugs last year.
This is not just a crisis or an epidemic. It’s slaughter.
Monday was National Fentanyl Prevention and Awareness Day, yet 300 Americans will have died from drug poisoning, as will another 300 on Tuesday and another 300 on Wednesday. We are nowhere near solving this crisis, and it has been steadily increasing each year.
Were young Americans dying from COVID-19 at these rates, our country’s hair would be on fire, just as it was on fire over COVID-19, which never approached these death rates.
While there has been more attention put on fentanyl recently and fentanyl accounts for the majority of these drug deaths, it was methamphetamine and heroin and cocaine before that.
And we are seeing rising rates of those drugs coming back as well, just as we are seeing deaths from marijuana laced with all of these drugs.
And there are new dangerous drugs coming into use as well. Few have heard of Captagon, and a year ago, almost nobody heard of xylazine, or “tranq,” which turns living humans into zombies.
As one user put it: “You do a shot, and you just crumble where you’re at. When you wake up, you can’t move.”
While the overwhelming focus on the drug problem in America — when there is focus — is on fentanyl, it is a mistake to ignore all other dangerous and illegal drug use, from marijuana to those most haven’t even heard of.
As William Shakespeare put it, “The worst is not/So long as we can say ‘this is the worst.’”
Perhaps a line of Arthur Miller’s is more urgently needed today: “Attention must be paid.” When this country wants to bring or pay attention to a problem, it certainly knows how to do so.
The COVID-19 years are Public Health Exhibit Number 1. Drunken driving and cigarette smoking are Public Health Exhibits 2 and 3. Nobody escaped the saturation of messaging and more, much more, on these public health crises.
While the major efforts dealing with the drug crisis today feature and fund addiction treatment and the distribution of poisoning-reversal drugs such as naloxone, there are even more nefarious efforts at work as well.
Major cities are giving drug paraphernalia away and even promoting drug use with public service announcements and displays to young Americans telling them, “If you do plan to use, start with a small dose and go slowly.”
Just imagine a campaign against drunken driving that said, “If you plan to drink and drive, drink only a little at first, and drive slowly, consider eating a meal first.”
As for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC states on its website its own concept of public health by instructing drug users to avail themselves of “Fentanyl strips” so as to “detect the presence of fentanyl in all different kinds of drugs (cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, etc.) and drug forms (pills, powder, and injectables).”
In other words: Use something to make sure your cocaine and meth and heroin use is safe and pure. Why not make it easier yet and distribute highly purified cocaine and meth, and heroin with a label of approval from the Food and Drug Administration?
As for naloxone, it is sadly a necessary tool, but it is the ambulance called after a car crash, a last-ditch effort after a trauma. Sometimes it will work, sometimes it will not. And it will not touch some drugs, including tranq.
May I submit to the court of public opinion that we accept Public Health Exhibit Number 4? Real prevention. It has worked before, just as it worked with forest fires, just as it worked with drunken driving, just as it worked with cigarette smoking — all of which have been dramatically reduced due to pervasive and serious messaging.
When our drug crisis was at its previous peak in the early 1980s, prevention messaging was everywhere: television, radio, movies, professional sports. We reduced drug use in this country by over 60%.
Since then, we have given up. We were losing about 5,000 Americans a year to drug poisoning in the early 1990s. Today, our country has grown by about 30%, but drug poisoning deaths have increased by over 2,000%.
We at the Coalition for Youth Drug Abuse Prevention are commencing a serious social media advertising campaign to awaken our country from its lethal slumber and to recreate in the modern media age what we did so well not so long ago: real prevention.
Let us oppose this slaughter in the way we know how, when we are serious about ending it.
• Seth Leibsohn is a co-founder of the Coalition for Youth Drug Abuse Prevention and a radio host at AM 960/The Patriot in Phoenix.
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