OPINION:
Unless one subscribes to a professional health or addiction-related news service, which excludes most Americans, another major news story came and went with little attention for the third year in a row. The government reported last month that illegal and dangerous drug use increased in the United States. Again.
But it didn’t just increase. For the third year in a row, it increased above and beyond our historical high watermark of drug use in 1979, which set off a major societal, political and cultural effort to combat it.
Combat it we did. With concerted efforts among law enforcement, political leaders, educators, the sports and entertainment industries and nearly every part of our culture, we reduced drug use by nearly 60%.
Over the course of many messaging and policy missteps and lack of attention to the issue, however, illegal and dangerous drug use has broken records, and we are now a very high society indeed — and a deadly one. Today, regular illegal drug use is nearly 20% higher than it was in what every expert in the field used to identify as our worst year, 1979.
While a great deal of attention has been put on drug poisoning deaths in the past few years, those numbers may not have been put into enough perspective for most to appreciate. Thirty years ago, for example, we reached the high watermark of HIV/AIDS deaths in America, and discussions and attention about that disease was everywhere — including marches, quilts, pins, movies and dedicated awareness campaigns in our high schools and universities.
Today, and for the past several years, we have been losing more Americans to drugs than we ever did to AIDS at its worst — far more. In fact, controlling for population, if drug deaths today were compared to AIDS deaths at their peak, the AIDS body count would be 30,000 higher. We are losing 50% more Americans to drug deaths than we did to AIDS in its worst year.
Many say our rate of drug deaths today is equivalent to a civilian airliner crashing every day. It’s more like two airliners crashing into each other every day. With between 107,000 and 111,000 drug poisonings each year and the thousands of fatal drugged-driving accidents, we could be building more than two Vietnam memorial walls a year — a wall identifying the lives killed over the course of 18 years.
The most prominent cause of drug poisoning today is fentanyl, and the most direct supply of it, though not the exclusive supply, comes across our southern border. Resources must be surged to the border to stop this — but it also needs to be understood that Americans (working with cartels), using authorized ports of entry, are responsible for most of this deadly importation. This supply and supply chain must be crushed.
But while supply can create demand, demand can also create supply, and the United States is the demand-customer base for too much drug use, with far too many Americans anesthetizing and killing themselves. The demand side needs much more attention, just as it was given in our successful efforts to reduce drug use dramatically from 1979 to 1992.
To that end, we need to remember that serious prevention messaging works almost every time it’s tried. It worked with forest fires, it worked with littering, it worked with drunken driving, it worked with seat-belt use, it worked with cigarette smoking and it worked with drug use. It took a serious political commitment from both parties, a serious drug czar (William Bennett) and serious presidential speeches and commitments. It also took advertising everywhere and anti-drug messaging from professional athletes and actors.
This country knows how to raise the alarm over a health crisis when it wants to. Just look at our recent experience with COVID — messaging was everywhere. Overwrought, but everywhere. Are we doing anything like we did with AIDS or COVID for our drug crisis? COVID, by the way, took far fewer lives of people under 50 in over three years than drug poisonings do every year.
Of course, death is the worst outcome from illegal and dangerous drug use, but drug use also fuels tremendous other societal harm and costs: education deficits to workplace and other accidents, violent crime, child removal, family breakups and lifetimes of relapses, treatment and recovery.
The Biden-Harris administration has been missing in action as it has presided over this, with neither the president nor vice president giving a single speech on any of this and, unlike the Republican National Convention, giving it any attention at the Democratic National Convention. Regardless of the current administration’s negligence and failure, this health crisis, which primarily affects our youth and young adults, must be taken seriously. We did it successfully with cigarettes, with drunken driving and other problems, including dangerous drug use once before. It’s past time to do it again.
• Seth Leibsohn is a radio host at KKNT in Phoenix, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and the co-founder of TheStopStartsHere.org.
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