Tag: overdose deaths

I read this stupid AP story and it set off warning bells in my head.

“ULTRA-POTENT HEROIN… MEXICAN DEALERS… $10 BAGS KILL UNSUSPECTING USERS INSTANTLY… NEEDLES STILL IN ARM AT THE DEATH SCENE!!!”

OK, the caps and exclamation points are mine, but you get the idea. It’s a little strange because people who die from heroin overdoses rarely suspect it and often have needles in the arms. [I’m saying this in the most patronizing tone I can muster:] That’s why it’s called an accidental drug overdose and not a suicide.

But I couldn’t articulate the bells in my head (they can are particularly unhelpful that way) until Jack Shafer of Slate wrote his response.

One constant prohibitionist line of argument is that drugs these days aren’t like the drugs you were safely taking when you were a kid (the strange subtext being that it would have been OK to legalize drugs back then… but now they’re too dangerous to regulate).

I love how Shafer points out that the AP story (headlined “Deadly, Ultra-pure Heroin Arrives in the US”) seems to ignore not one or two but 19AP stories over the past 25 years that all herald basically the same thing.

[It is, of course, particularly ironic to use the risk of dying from an overdose as an argument in favorof prohibition. The one sure thing we know would come from legal and regulated drugs is a guarantee of consistent purity. Heroin overdose deaths could drop to near zero if users actually knew how much they were taking. It really is that simple. But to get there we would have care more about the lives of heroin users more than we care about “sending a message.”]

Here’s a good example:

The Netherlands has about 120 drug overdose deaths per year. This is a rate of 0.75 per 100,000.

Meanwhile the US, with all our money and prisons and police and people who wish to “send the right message” has this problem:

The mortality rates from unintentional drug overdose (not including alcohol) have risen steadily since the early 1970s, and over the past ten years they have reached historic highs. Rates are currently 4 to 5 times higher than the rates during the “black tar” heroin epidemic in the mid-1970s and more than twice what they were during the peak years of crack cocaine in the early 1990s. The rate shown for 2005 translates into 22,400 unintentional and intentional drug overdose deaths. To put this in context, just over 17,000 homicides occurred in 2005.

That’s a rate just under 7 per 100,000. So if we adopted dutch policies toward drugs (the dutch rate wasn’t always so low, by the way) and could get our rate down to that seen in the Netherlands, we could save close to 20,000 lives per year. But we choose not to.

Somehow, according to prohibitionists, saving lives sends the wrong message. “If drugs don’t kill, how will people know they’re bad?!” I’ve heard the argument many times. It’s pretty dumb. First of all, if drug don’t kill, they’re not so bad. Second, since our drugs do kill, why do we still lead the world in drug abuse?

How do you save lives? Some of it is shockingly simple. For starters:

1) Give out Narcan.

2) Pass good Samaritan laws protecting those who call ambulances for people who overdose.

3) Treat drug abuse like a health problem.

A friend and former student of mine, a police officer on Long Island, tells me:
“Right now heroin is cheaper then crack and cocaine. So it has become the drug of choice. From Jan 07 to Aug 07 there was 42 heroin overdose just in two precinct in Nassau county.”

There are eight precincts in Nassau County and a total population of 1.3 million. Let’s assume, because I don’t know better, that the 2 precincts represent 1/4 of the population. That’s an annual heroin overdose death rate of 22 per 100,000 people, about twice the national average.

If we really cared about saving lives, we could save these lives. But we clearly don’t care because we persist in policies that cause deaths. If saving lives were our priority, we could follow the policies of countries with much lower overdose death rates.

First of all, education. We treat all illegal drugs as equally bad. Zero Tolerance. But all drugs aren’t equally bad. Heroin is a horrible drug. Maybe the worst. Marijuana isn’t really bad at all. Cocaine is somewhere in between. This is important. I would love to give teenagers weed if only they wouldn’t try heroin. At least tell them the truth about weed so they’ll believe it when you tell them to fear heroin.

Take the Netherlands. Yes, the Netherlands. The country that drug warriors love to laugh at and dismiss because they don’t want to fight our war on drugs. In Amsterdam, you can walk into a tax-paying store and legally buy weed, hash, even magic mushrooms. The government gives out heroin to addicts (not most addicts, however). Prohibitionists say that “sends the wrong message.”

Here’s the message: in the Netherlands, drug usage rates and overdose rates are much lowerthan in the U.S. (and so is their incarceration rate, while we’re at it).

Fewer people take drugs because they don’t play the prohibitionist’s drug game. Those that do take drugs don’t die. The overdose rate in the Netherlands is 0.75 per 100,000.

Get this: in their entire country of over 16 million, there were 122 overdose deaths in a year. That’s fewer than Baltimore City alone. Probably fewer than Nassau County, too.

We could save lives–tens of thousands of lives each year–if we really cared about saving lives. But we don’t. We see overdoses as unfortunate. Hell, maybe not even that. Overdose deaths “send a good message,” I’ve heard.

The war on drugs isn’t about saving lives. It’s about maintaining prohibition. Too bad prohibition kills.