So where’s the outrage?
The Trump administration is trying to gin up the drug war again, only this time the focus is on “opioids.”
Opiods is a term that covers both prescription painkillers like oxycodone (OxyContin), hydrocodone (Vicodin), codeine, morphine and fentanyl, as well as heroin. They’re all either made from the sap of opium poppies, variants of the natural product or synthesized copies of them.
At least this time the feds are targeting drugs that, unlike marijuana, have actually killed a lot of people. In 2015, the last year for which statistics are available, there were more than 33,000 opioid overdose deaths related to prescription pain relievers and heroin, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Trump routinely includes promises to end the opioid epidemic and ties it to the flow of illegal drugs across the Mexican border. The mainstream press routinely views the epidemic with alarm. Congress just included an additional $100 million-plus for fighting the epidemic in the bill to keep the government running through September.
But compared to past public reaction to government-generated anti-drug hysteria, the American public’s reaction so far seems to be running the gamut from polite applause to detached disinterest.
So why no outrage?
Here are four possible reasons:
• This iteration of the drug war differs from the previous ones in that the current opioid epidemic was started by a different class of drug pushers. They’re called doctors. According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, doctors wrote 259 million prescriptions for opioids in 2012, “enough to give every American adult their own bottle of pills.” Fast forward three years: Of the 33,000 opioid overdose deaths in 2015, more than 20,000 were “related to prescription pain relievers.” Heroin accounted for 12,990 deaths. In other words, a lot of people aren’t getting their drugs from cartels; they’re getting them from drug stores. It’s a lot harder for politicians to demonize doctors than traditional drug pushers, even if the docs did screw up by over-prescribing opioids — especially when politicians are about as popular as traditional drug pushers.
• In previous opioid epidemics, most of the addicts started out using opioids for kicks. In this one, most of them started out using opioids for chronic pain. It’s easy to generate outrage against someone who started using heroin to get high. That narrative doesn’t work against people who ended up using it because they were in chronic pain.
• The previous drug war didn’t work, and judging by past performance the American people have no reason to believe this one will either. Drug use in the U.S. started to spike in 1965. In the ensuing 52 years, the country has spent roughly $1 trillion fighting drugs and made a staggering 50 million arrests, about half for hard drugs and half for marijuana. (Until relatively recently, the overwhelming majority of arrests were for marijuana; that’s begun to change as more and more states are legalizing or decriminalizing pot.) Yet today drug use in the United States is at near- or all-time highs for all categories of drugs. It’s hard to think of another undertaking of the American government that has been a bigger, on-going failure. As a result, chances are that when it comes to the anti-opioid campaign the Trump administration is proposing to start, most Americans are keeping expectations low — like lower than whale shit low.
• The drug war has done more to introduce the practices of the totalitarian state into American life than any other governmental action in a century — including massive incarceration, no-knock searches, stop-and-frisk police stops, racial profiling, massive urine testing, Soviet-style re-education camps, property seizure and children informing on their parents, to name a few. Any outrage Americans might have about opioid abuse is modified by the knowledge that they might be collateral damage in the war to stop it.
