Pubdate: Sun, 09 Feb 2014
Source: Burlington County Times (NJ)
Copyright: 2014 Calkins Newspapers. Inc.
Contact: https://phillyburbs-dot-com.bloxcms-ny1.com/contact/
Website: http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/local/burlington_county_times_news/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2128
Author: Eugene Robinson, Washington Post.

We're Losing the Drug War; Let's Change Our Approach

Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman is yet another victim of 
the war on drugs. Prohibition is not working. It is time to try 
something new. Hoffman, 46, was found dead in the bathroom of his 
Manhattan apartment last Sunday morning, apparently the victim of a 
heroin overdose. According to widely published reports, there was a 
syringe in his arm. Police found the place littered with small 
plastic bags stamped "Ace of Spades" or "Ace of Hearts" - brand names 
that street dealers use.

Hoffman had lived through a familiar pattern: experimentation, 
addiction, rehab, abstinence, relapse, more rehab, more abstinence, 
another relapse.

Why would a man held in such high esteem, a man with so much going 
for him and so much to live for, risk it all by buying illegal drugs 
from a criminal on the street and then injecting them into his veins? 
I doubt we'll ever know for sure.

What we do know is that the need to get high is beyond some people's 
control. Our drug policy of prohibition and interdiction makes it 
difficult and dangerous for people like Hoffman to get high, but not 
impossible - and makes these tragic overdose deaths more common than 
they have to be.

The obvious problem is that when an addict buys drugs on the street, 
he or she has no way of knowing how pure the product is and what else 
it might contain. In recent months, according to health officials, 37 
people have died in Maryland, 23 in western Pennsylvania and several 
others in Ohio and New York from injecting heroin adulterated with 
fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that can be up to 100 times more potent 
than morphine.

As long as this commerce is illegal, it is totally unregulated. Since 
we know that addicts will continue to buy drugs on the street, we 
also know that some will die from drugs that are either too potent or 
adulterated with other substances that could make them lethal. Is 
this really the intent of our drug policy? To invite users to kill 
themselves? The idea is supposed to be that authorities will somehow 
keep the drugs from entering the country. This would be a joke if it 
weren't such an epic tragedy.

In the 1990s, when I was the Washington Post's correspondent in South 
America, I watched as U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents 
played Whac-A-Mole with the cocaine industry. They'd harass the coca 
growers in Peru, only to see more acreage planted in Bolivia.

The agents would go to work in Bolivia, only to see coca plantations 
sprout up in Colombia. By the time the DEA had marshaled its assets 
in Colombia, the fields were lush and green once more in Peru.

A couple of times, authorities in these countries flew me out to see 
fields of opium poppies they had discovered - the drug lords were 
diversifying into heroin. But the epicenter of poppy cultivation is 
Afghanistan, where U.S.-backed officials turn a blind eye.

When you talk to leaders in the countries that produce or ship 
illegal drugs, they all say the same thing: We wouldn't have a drug 
industry if there were no demand. They're right. And since we 
obviously don't know how to eliminate this demand, we need to try 
some new approaches.

For marijuana, we should follow Colorado and Washington toward 
decriminalization.

Addiction to harder drugs should be considered a medical problem, 
period - a chronic illness, like diabetes, that might not be curable 
but can be managed. There would be times when managing addiction 
meant prescribing to addicts pharmaceutical-grade heroin and other 
drugs and then medically monitoring them. There would be other times 
when it meant treatment to get clean. Philip Seymour Hoffman had 
tried and failed, tried and failed. But who knows? Next time, he 
might have made it.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom