The outstanding article "How's Amanda?" [front page, July 24] was an excruciatingly accurate portrayal of the everyday reality of countless families overwhelmed by the power of heroin addiction coupled with their frustration with the high rate of relapse to heroin use after entering treatment. But the article said the average heroin addict dies after 10 years of heroin use. Taking the article's accurate estimate of a total of about 1.6 million heroin addicts in the United States and linking it to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention count of annual heroin overdose deaths, 10,574 in 2014, the risk of overdose death for a heroin addict is about 0.6 percent a year. That means that over the course of 10 years of heroin addiction, about 6 out of 100 heroin addicts die of a heroin overdose. This shockingly low number explains why so many heroin addicts are oblivious to the risk of overdose death: Overdoses kill a very small percentage of their heroin-using friends each year. Robert L. DuPont, Rockville The writer was director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse from 1973 to 1978. [end]
It should come as no surprise that the vast majority of heroin users have used marijuana (and many other drugs) not only long before they used heroin but while they are using heroin. Like nearly all people with substance abuse problems, most heroin users initiated their drug use early in their teens, usually beginning with alcohol and marijuana. There is ample evidence that early initiation of drug use primes the brain for enhanced later responses to other drugs. These facts underscore the need for effective prevention to reduce adolescent use of alcohol, tobacco and marijuana in order to turn back the heroin and opioid epidemic and to reduce burdens addiction in this country. [continues 238 words]
The success of marijuana legalization in some states has put drug policy at the top of nation's attention for the first time since the cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s. At the heart of drug legalization is the conviction that the top priority of drug reform is to get the criminal justice system out of drug policy because our prisons are full of innocent drug users, particularly marijuana users, caught up in the failed "War on Drugs." In this view, drug legalization will empty our prisons and yield big financial savings. [continues 633 words]
When Profs. Becker and Murphy suggest that the illegal status of drugs "may increase addiction rates, and it may even increase the total number of addicts," they are dead wrong. Lower rates of illegal drug use mean lower rates of addiction. Both use of a drug and the prevalence of addiction are closely tied to availability of a drug, perceived risk of harm from use of that drug and price. The prevalence of illegal drug use remains very low compared with "legal" drugs because their illegality reduces their availability, maintains higher perception of risk from harm, and raises prices. [continues 199 words]
Regarding the Nov. 26 editorial "What should the feds do about pot?": The new laws of Colorado and Washington state do not simply decriminalize marijuana; they commercialize its production and sale, thus creating a major commercialized drug industry. These laws are explicitly modeled on the tobacco and alcohol industries - industries that make the bulk of their profits from substance abusers. Marijuana has 60 percent more cancer-causing agents than tobacco and stays in the body and brain 20 times longer than alcohol. There are overwhelming public health reasons to oppose legalization of marijuana. [continues 66 words]
The headlines streaming from the recent Journal of the American Medical Association study on marijuana use and pulmonary function all suggest that marijuana is safe ("Marijuana doesn't harm lung function," Web, Jan. 10). Omitted from the calculation is the large number of marijuana users who believed that they would always be occasional users but progressed to heavy use. If the researchers included chronic, heavy marijuana users as part of the cost of occasional marijuana use, the risks of occasional marijuana use would have been more complete and served as compelling evidence for not using marijuana. Consider the estimated 9 percent of marijuana users who become addicted. That number goes up to 17 percent for users who start at young ages. [continues 103 words]
An editorial calling for federal rescheduling of cannabis was misguided and misinformed. In regards to "Our View: While cannabis is illegal, dispensaries will struggle" (Aug. 8), the suggestion that marijuana be reclassified to a lower schedule, like prescription drugs, is misguided and misinformed. Marijuana is a Schedule I drug, which reflects the facts that it is widely abused, that it has no approved medical use by the Food and Drug Administration, and that it lacks accepted safety for use under medical supervision. [continues 167 words]
I commend The Sun for the impressive investigation that revealed the failures of the Break the Cycle program to monitor nonviolent but drug-using offenders and provide swift, certain and graduated punishments for all violations of the program's tough no-drug-use standard ("Lieutenant governor hijacks probation," editorial, Nov. 20). But the implication that Break the Cycle should be scrapped was way off the mark. Break the Cycle deserves substantially increased resources and stronger administrative support to fulfill its potential as a national model for the criminal justice system. [continues 161 words]
Last month the Institute of Medicine released a report in response to the two-year-long wave of ballot initiatives supporting medical marijuana. It assessed the scientific base of the claim that suffering terminally ill people are unnecessarily deprived of a useful treatment by drug laws that criminalize smoking. There has never been controversy about the use of purified chemicals in smoke to treat any illness, as witnessed by the availability of synthetic tetrahydrocabinol (THC) since 1985. The only dispute between the drug-law hawks and doves is the place of smoked marijuana in medical treatment. The institute's report, balanced and firmly rooted in three decades of scientific research, reached this conclusion: [continues 684 words]
