As a provider of addiction treatment, mostly to teens, it is frustrating to watch as the problem worsens. No family is immune.

The federal government has mandated a 100-patient limit for physicians who treat opiate addiction with buprenorphine (Suboxone, Zubsolve). Physicians are not limited in treating any other medical problem. The number of physicians certified to treat opiate addiction with buprenorphine is not enough to serve even a minority of addicted patients.

The addiction problem has several root causes. The proliferation and mass use of social media has accelerated addiction. Teens no longer accept what parents say about the dangers of drugs. Instead they use social media to get answers that downplay the dangers, and instruct impressionable teens on how to obtain drugs and how to modify drugs for intravenous use. Technology has been a contributor to the problem.

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Prosecutors are the most powerful players in the American criminal justice system. Their decisions - like whom to charge with a crime, and what sentence to seek - have profound consequences.

So why is it so hard to keep them from breaking the law or violating the Constitution?

The short answer is that they are almost never held accountable for misconduct, even when it results in wrongful convictions. It is time for a new approach to ending this behavior: federal oversight of prosecutors' offices that repeatedly ignore defendants' legal and constitutional rights. There is a successful model for this in the Justice Department's monitoring of police departments with histories of misconduct.

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ONE of the most painful experiences of being a psychiatrist is having a patient for whom none of the available therapies or medications work.

A while back, I was asked to do a consultation on just such a patient. This person had been a heroin addict in her early 20s. She had quit the opioid five years earlier, but her life was plagued with anxiety, apathy and self-doubt that prior treatments had not helped. At the end of the session, almost as an afterthought, she noted with irony that the only time in her adult life when she had been able to socialize easily and function at work was when she had been hooked on heroin.

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Michael R. Moffett, a Buffalo police officer on suspension without pay, overdosed on opioids Tuesday morning the second time in recent months and on-duty police officers administered three doses of Narcan to revive him, according to police sources.

Moffett, 26, was found unconscious at his South Buffalo residence by his girlfriend, and a 911 call for help was made, the police sources said.

The officer's Dorrance Avenue home was later searched after police obtained a warrant. The findings of the search have not been revealed.

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As a former member of the U.S. Navy, I've seen the pain that lingers after our men and women in uniform return home. It's our country's responsibility to provide veterans with any medical treatment that has proven to be effective.

More and more states are recognizing the overwhelming data about medical cannabis. With 24 states and the District of Columbia now operating medical cannabis programs, many Americans now have a viable alternative to opioid pain medication. In the current state of addiction and overdose in our country - a tragedy our state knows too well, as more than 1,000 New Yorkers die a year from opioid-related deaths - we should welcome any alternative with open arms. This situation is even more dire for veterans, as the opioid overdose rate for U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs patients is almost double the national average.

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In New Jersey, voters and lawmakers gave judges more power to release low-risk defendants who can't afford bail, letting them go home rather than sit in jail while they await trial. In Idaho, a new law created 24-hour crisis centers to help keep people with mental health issues from being locked up unnecessarily. Georgia and Louisiana established courts for military veterans accused of crimes. Hawaii funded programs to help reunify children with parents who are behind bars.

These are just a few of the hundreds of criminal-justice reforms that states around the country have put in place over the last two years, according to a new report by the Vera Institute of Justice.

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TOWN OF WALLKILL, N.Y. - A Massachusetts police chief made headlines and created a social media stir last year when he declared the 50-year "war on drugs" a failure and turned his department away from criminal penalties and toward treatment.

That initiative by Gloucester Police Chief Leonard Campanello has picked up traction in other departments across the nation. As the New York Times reported in January, "56 police departments in 17 states have started programs modeled on or inspired by Gloucester's, with 110 more preparing to do so."

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Lebanon, Va. - LATE on Christmas night 2013, April Hileman was summoned for a drug test. She had broken the curfew imposed on her by a drug court and relapsed with the opioid pills she'd been hooked on for six years. Earlier that day, Ms. Hileman had driven to a neighbor's house here in far southwestern Virginia to buy a handful of Suboxone pills, or "Box," as the drug is sometimes called. After she tested positive, Judge Michael Moore of Russell County ordered her to jail, and her 3-year-old daughter spent the rest of the holidays with relatives.

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To the Editor:

Re "Legal Pot, Free Trade" (Op-Ed, May 21): Ioan Grillo's proposal for a Nafta-style market in legal marijuana mistakes a symptom of the organized-crime epidemic in Mexico - the illegal drug trade - for an underlying cause. Rather, the major driver appears to be the corruption infecting all levels of the Mexican state and economy.

Otherwise, it is hard to explain the Mexican government's chronic inability to keep organized crime from dominating so many legal businesses, like casino gambling, cigarettes and even something as banal as mining.

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Mexico City - WHEN the Mexican Army actually allows journalists to watch its soldiers in action, it's often to see them burning marijuana crops. It's strictly for show, but it's fun. You get to fly in a military helicopter over the Sierra Madre, then touch down to see troops posing with their rifles as they walk into green marijuana fields. And the highlight: You watch hundreds of pounds of grass go up in flames.

Mexican soldiers have been conducting this ritual for decades, and the photos have come to define the country's war on drugs. But amid a wave of drug policy reform, those photos may soon disappear from news pages and be relegated to historical archives.

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Undercover Narcotics Detective Kept Accident Under The Official Radar

An unmarked sheriff's car slammed last month into the back of a parked SUV.

The hood of the county-issued Impala folded like a gum wrapper, and the engine compartment crunched inward, yet the impact pushed the two-ton Dodge Nitro into a utility pole 100 feet away.

The pole was just feet from Gene McCarthy's pub at Hamburg and Republic streets in Buffalo's Old First Ward. When the pub's lights flickered, the handful of patrons inside at 1:37 a.m. April 2 ventured out to find littered car parts, the SUV pressed against the pole, and a tall man in his 30s emerging unhurt from the Impala.

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Regarding the May 9 front-page story about insurers balking at addiction costs, I have empathy for the people who are addicted and their families, but not sympathy. These people must know going in that these strong medications could be addicting.

The families of the addicted say they are frustrated and angry because the health insurance companies don't continue paying for the treatment costs that are incurred, yet families of the addicted admit that their children have been inpatients multiple times, evidently with failing results.

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The opioid epidemic is now a leading cause of death in the United States, ravaging communities across the country. At last, Congress has snapped to attention. But its recent flurry of legislation will be of little help unless lawmakers are willing to fund treatment and prevention programs.

The House last week passed 18 bills related to opioids, and the Senate approved a comprehensive bill in March. The bills, which will be reconciled in a conference committee, are overdue. Opioids, a category of drugs that includes heroin and prescription painkillers like oxycodone, killed more than 28,000 people in 2014, and the rate of overdoses has tripled since 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost two million Americans abused or were dependent on these drugs in 2014.

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The issue of addiction is now being brought to the forefront of public consciousness, and rightly so. This problem is not new, but has escalated to a point where it is affecting people who may not have been previously exposed to the illness.

What needs to be brought home is the fact that addiction, no matter what the substance, is an illness, not a problem brought about by a lack of character. When medical professionals, psychiatric providers and patient family members approach the addicted individual with a judgmental attitude, it only reinforces to that person what he already feels - a lack of self-worth and guilt - which only serves to put up another barrier to the process of recovery.

As providers, family members and neighbors, it is in our best interest to put judgment aside and treat addicted individuals with empathy and compassion. To do otherwise is simply counterproductive.

Williamsville

[end]

Death is one of the greatest personifications there is. It visits all of us and gets very personal. Continually we are inundated with statistics of all kinds of deaths. These include the horrors of terrorism, shootings, suicides, abortions, plane crashes and cancer. These stats seem to keep death at a comfortable bay, deluding us into thinking we will never be part of the masses. In fact, at times we reluctantly find ourselves viewing with morbid fascination the demise of others. Somehow we can stay detached because "the visitor" has not yet come to our door.

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BEGINNING in the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies selling high-dose opioids seized upon a notion, based on flimsy scientific evidence, that regardless of the length of treatment, patients would not become addicted to opioids.

It has proved to be one of the biggest mistakes in modern medicine.

An epidemic of prescription drug abuse has swept across the country as a result, and one of the latest victims, according to The New York Times, may have been Prince.

The paper reported that he had developed a problem with prescription painkillers, and that just before his death, friends sought urgent medical help from a California doctor who specializes in treating people addicted to pain medication. Whether pain pills played a role in his death won't be known until the results of an autopsy are released.

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MARIJUANA advocates are teaming up with Madison Avenue to try to make pot palatable to mainstream Americans - and to the advertisers that want to reach them.

High Times, the 42-year-old must-have magazine for the cannabis enthusiast, has collaborated with Sparks & Honey, an Omnicom advertising agency, on a report meant to prompt big-picture thinking in the marijuana industry. The paper, "Rebranding Marijuana," was released April 20, the unofficial pot holiday.

"Through the slow legal and regulatory processes," the report noted, "marijuana is opening up opportunities across a variety of industries, most of which have nothing to do with yesterday's stoner weed."

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The article, "On track for 570 opiate deaths in 2016, Erie County steps up response," in the April 6 Buffalo News in part focused on the shortage of health care providers who can prescribe medication assisted treatment for opiate use disorders.

It noted the small number of physicians who are certified to prescribe buprenorphine ( trade names: Suboxone, subutex and Zubsolv). Even when certified, physicians can prescribe to only 100 clients at a time.

Unfortunately, although nurse practitioners ( NPs) and physician assistants ( PAs) provide medical care to millions of people daily, and are an integral part of health care, a federal law created in 2000 prohibits NPs/ PAs from prescribing buprenorphine to treat addictions. Buprenorphine is a schedule III controlled substance, which when utilized as prescribed does not induce a "high" and has less risk for overdose than do other prescription opioids and heroin. Ironically, NPs and PAs can prescribe buprenorphine for pain management.

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To the Editor:

Re "Northeast Opiate Crisis Stalls Marijuana Legalization" (news article, April 20):

Marijuana access is associated with reduced incidences of opioid abuse and mortality.

According to a 2015 National Bureau of Economic Research study, "States permitting medical marijuana dispensaries experience a relative decrease in both opioid addictions and opioid overdose deaths compared to states that do not."

Separate studies also find that cannabis is associated with better treatment outcomes in opioid-dependent subjects. Writing this year in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, researchers at Columbia University reported a "beneficial effect of marijuana smoking on treatment retention."

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To the Editor:

Re "Rethink the Global War on Drugs" (editorial, April 25):

While the 2016 Special Session of the General Assembly on the World Drug Problem had its limitations, and while the shift from prohibition and criminalization to a public health perspective has been subtler than many would have liked, the debate has opened the door to broader discussions about drug law reform in preparation for 2019, the date set for the next major review.

The issues are complex and challenges remain, but this is a step in the right direction.

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