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Cin · 08-11-2013, 09:59 AM

Speaking of the war on drugs here are just a few of the things that are ludicrously devastating about it.

http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/1...#ixzz2bfC6ITUx

Seventy-six million Americans suffer from chronic, daily pain, and at least nine million have daily pain that is severe enough to interfere significantly with their jobs and relationships. As baby boomers continue to age, the proportion of the population suffering from pain will only increase. Already, undertreated pain is estimated to cost the country $61 billion a year in lost productivity, according to the American Academy of Pain Medicine. Even among patients who are dying, half are not given adequate pain relief. Yet virtually all the news about opioid pain medication is focused on drug abuse and addiction and how to reduce prescribing of the only drugs that show effectiveness for the worst pain. Research finds that the vast majority of people who misuse opioids have never even been in pain treatment, and more than 97% of pain patients without prior drug problems do not develop addictions if treated with prescription painkillers. Nonetheless, because of the war on drugs, pain patients are treated with skepticism and pain doctors live in fear of being prosecuted for "overprescribing." The end result is that addicts still get their opioids without much trouble, while genuine patients often can't find treatment. Those who do must typically be tracked in a database and must schedule frequent, expensive doctor visits for surveillance like urine testing. Further, those whose pain is best treated with marijuana still face arrest in many states, even those that have legalized it for medical purposes.

In recent years, prescription drug overdose has overtaken homicide on the list of leading causes of preventable death in the U.S. Overdose now comes in second only to car accidents, having killed more than 35,000 people in 2007. The problem has been blamed on increased prescribing of pain medications. However, most of the deaths involve people who were not prescribed these drugs; the deaths have largely occurred in the context of drug abuse, with victims mixing painkillers (mainly obtained without a legitimate prescription) with alcohol or illegal drugs. There is a safe, nontoxic drug called naloxone that can instantly reverse opioid overdose and prevent most of these deaths. But the drug war interferes with saving overdose victims in two ways: first, because witnesses to overdose fear prosecution, they often don't call for help until it's too late. Second, because the drug war supports the belief that making naloxone available over-the-counter or with opioid prescriptions would encourage drug use, the antidote is available only through harm reduction programs like needle exchanges or in some state programs aimed at drug users.

There are many dedicated professionals who treat people with addiction compassionately, but the American addiction treatment system on the whole remains highly dysfunctional: • Research has long shown that treatment that employs confrontation and humiliation increases drug use rather than fighting addiction, but the majority of rehab programs still include these elements. • Tough-love boot camps, wilderness programs and emotional growth or therapeutic boarding schools — programs aimed mainly at teens who take drugs — remain unregulated at the federal level and continue to use harsh, counterproductive tactics. • Ninety percent of addiction counselors focus on getting people to attend 12-step programs for addiction, even though they are not the only way to recover and don't work for many people. • Methadone and buprenorphine maintenance are the most effective treatments for opioid addiction, yet methadone treatment is exiled from mainstream health care and ghettoized in clinics; as for buprenorphine, any one doctor is not allowed to treat more than 100 patients with the drug. What do these facts have to do with the drug war? If addiction were seen as a disease like any other — not as a problem for the criminal justice system — addiction treatment would have been integrated into ordinary medicine long ago, and the extreme disrespect that many patients still endure would not have been tolerated. Much more treatment could be funded, of course, if the states and federal government combined weren't spending $50 billion annually on law enforcement and prisons.

Although many assume that the popularity of more potent stimulants like crack and crystal meth was a cause of drug war crackdowns, some research suggests that it is actually a result of the war on drugs. When law enforcement targets the drug supply, the most powerful and highly concentrated forms of substances become more attractive to sellers and users, since smaller quantities are generally easier to hide. A similar effect was seen during Prohibition in the U.S., with stronger liquors like moonshine displacing weaker drinks like beer. More potent drugs increase the risk for overdose and often addiction.

In Mexico alone, nearly 35,000 people have been killed in violence related to the drug trade since the Mexican government decided to go to war, literally, with traffickers. Just in 2010, there were 15,273 drug-related murders. Many of those killed were innocent bystanders. While people tend to think that drug use itself leads to violent behavior, studies show that the vast majority of drug-related violence is connected to drug-trade disputes, not drug highs. Ironically, alcohol is the drug that is pharmacologically most likely to increase violence, but we haven't seen much violence related to the alcohol trade since the end of Prohibition.

When President Nixon declared war on drugs on June 17, 1971, about 110 people per 100,000 in the population were incarcerated. Today, we have 2.3 million prisoners: 743 people per 100,000 in the population. The U.S. has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of its prisoners. As Senator Jim Webb once put it, "Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different — and vastly counterproductive." This rise has been driven by the war on drugs: more than half of all federal prisoners are serving time for drug offenses, while about 25% of jail inmates and 21% of state prisoners are drug offenders. The U.S. incarcerates more people for drug offenses today than it did for all offenses combined before the drug war. "It's far beyond anything any other country has done and beyond any other civilization in the history of mankind," says Dr. Josiah Rich, a professor of medicine at Brown University, who wrote a recent editorial for the New England Journal of Medicine on the incarceration epidemic. Incarceration is harmful to mental and physical health — increasing risk for virtually all diseases and disorders — and does not treat addiction.

The most egregious health effects of the drug war have hit black Americans. The rate of incarceration for drug crimes is 10 times higher in blacks than in whites, even though drug use and dealing rates are the same or even higher for whites. More African Americans today are under criminal justice supervision — in prison, on parole or probation — than were enslaved 10 years before the Civil War, according to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. And more than 10% of black men between the ages of 20 and 35 are in prison, which keeps them from their families and children. Carl Hart, associate professor of psychology at Columbia University (full disclosure: he and I are currently writing a book together), notes that the real rise in incarceration occurred under President Reagan and later presidents, not Nixon. "The damage was done after 1986," he says. "And even Reagan wasn't incarcerating as many as Bush and Clinton did." Update [1 p.m.]: The impact of the prison explosion has been devastating. President Jimmy Carter writes today in an impassioned op-ed in the New York Times, calling for an end to the global drug war:
In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself."

The war on drugs has since done more to harm the black family and, consequently, the entire American family than ... any other drug.

08-11-2013, 09:59 AM	#3181
Cin Senior Member How Do You Identify?: Butch Preferred Pronoun?: she Relationship Status: Truly Madly Deeply Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: In My Head Posts: 2,814 My Photo Gallery Thanks: 6,333 Thanked 10,404 Times in 2,476 Posts Rep Power: 21474851	Speaking of the war on drugs here are just a few of the things that are ludicrously devastating about it. http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/1...#ixzz2bfC6ITUx Seventy-six million Americans suffer from chronic, daily pain, and at least nine million have daily pain that is severe enough to interfere significantly with their jobs and relationships. As baby boomers continue to age, the proportion of the population suffering from pain will only increase. Already, undertreated pain is estimated to cost the country $61 billion a year in lost productivity, according to the American Academy of Pain Medicine. Even among patients who are dying, half are not given adequate pain relief. Yet virtually all the news about opioid pain medication is focused on drug abuse and addiction and how to reduce prescribing of the only drugs that show effectiveness for the worst pain. Research finds that the vast majority of people who misuse opioids have never even been in pain treatment, and more than 97% of pain patients without prior drug problems do not develop addictions if treated with prescription painkillers. Nonetheless, because of the war on drugs, pain patients are treated with skepticism and pain doctors live in fear of being prosecuted for "overprescribing." The end result is that addicts still get their opioids without much trouble, while genuine patients often can't find treatment. Those who do must typically be tracked in a database and must schedule frequent, expensive doctor visits for surveillance like urine testing. Further, those whose pain is best treated with marijuana still face arrest in many states, even those that have legalized it for medical purposes. In recent years, prescription drug overdose has overtaken homicide on the list of leading causes of preventable death in the U.S. Overdose now comes in second only to car accidents, having killed more than 35,000 people in 2007. The problem has been blamed on increased prescribing of pain medications. However, most of the deaths involve people who were not prescribed these drugs; the deaths have largely occurred in the context of drug abuse, with victims mixing painkillers (mainly obtained without a legitimate prescription) with alcohol or illegal drugs. There is a safe, nontoxic drug called naloxone that can instantly reverse opioid overdose and prevent most of these deaths. But the drug war interferes with saving overdose victims in two ways: first, because witnesses to overdose fear prosecution, they often don't call for help until it's too late. Second, because the drug war supports the belief that making naloxone available over-the-counter or with opioid prescriptions would encourage drug use, the antidote is available only through harm reduction programs like needle exchanges or in some state programs aimed at drug users. There are many dedicated professionals who treat people with addiction compassionately, but the American addiction treatment system on the whole remains highly dysfunctional: • Research has long shown that treatment that employs confrontation and humiliation increases drug use rather than fighting addiction, but the majority of rehab programs still include these elements. • Tough-love boot camps, wilderness programs and emotional growth or therapeutic boarding schools — programs aimed mainly at teens who take drugs — remain unregulated at the federal level and continue to use harsh, counterproductive tactics. • Ninety percent of addiction counselors focus on getting people to attend 12-step programs for addiction, even though they are not the only way to recover and don't work for many people. • Methadone and buprenorphine maintenance are the most effective treatments for opioid addiction, yet methadone treatment is exiled from mainstream health care and ghettoized in clinics; as for buprenorphine, any one doctor is not allowed to treat more than 100 patients with the drug. What do these facts have to do with the drug war? If addiction were seen as a disease like any other — not as a problem for the criminal justice system — addiction treatment would have been integrated into ordinary medicine long ago, and the extreme disrespect that many patients still endure would not have been tolerated. Much more treatment could be funded, of course, if the states and federal government combined weren't spending $50 billion annually on law enforcement and prisons. Although many assume that the popularity of more potent stimulants like crack and crystal meth was a cause of drug war crackdowns, some research suggests that it is actually a result of the war on drugs. When law enforcement targets the drug supply, the most powerful and highly concentrated forms of substances become more attractive to sellers and users, since smaller quantities are generally easier to hide. A similar effect was seen during Prohibition in the U.S., with stronger liquors like moonshine displacing weaker drinks like beer. More potent drugs increase the risk for overdose and often addiction. In Mexico alone, nearly 35,000 people have been killed in violence related to the drug trade since the Mexican government decided to go to war, literally, with traffickers. Just in 2010, there were 15,273 drug-related murders. Many of those killed were innocent bystanders. While people tend to think that drug use itself leads to violent behavior, studies show that the vast majority of drug-related violence is connected to drug-trade disputes, not drug highs. Ironically, alcohol is the drug that is pharmacologically most likely to increase violence, but we haven't seen much violence related to the alcohol trade since the end of Prohibition. When President Nixon declared war on drugs on June 17, 1971, about 110 people per 100,000 in the population were incarcerated. Today, we have 2.3 million prisoners: 743 people per 100,000 in the population. The U.S. has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of its prisoners. As Senator Jim Webb once put it, "Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different — and vastly counterproductive." This rise has been driven by the war on drugs: more than half of all federal prisoners are serving time for drug offenses, while about 25% of jail inmates and 21% of state prisoners are drug offenders. The U.S. incarcerates more people for drug offenses today than it did for all offenses combined before the drug war. "It's far beyond anything any other country has done and beyond any other civilization in the history of mankind," says Dr. Josiah Rich, a professor of medicine at Brown University, who wrote a recent editorial for the New England Journal of Medicine on the incarceration epidemic. Incarceration is harmful to mental and physical health — increasing risk for virtually all diseases and disorders — and does not treat addiction. The most egregious health effects of the drug war have hit black Americans. The rate of incarceration for drug crimes is 10 times higher in blacks than in whites, even though drug use and dealing rates are the same or even higher for whites. More African Americans today are under criminal justice supervision — in prison, on parole or probation — than were enslaved 10 years before the Civil War, according to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. And more than 10% of black men between the ages of 20 and 35 are in prison, which keeps them from their families and children. Carl Hart, associate professor of psychology at Columbia University (full disclosure: he and I are currently writing a book together), notes that the real rise in incarceration occurred under President Reagan and later presidents, not Nixon. "The damage was done after 1986," he says. "And even Reagan wasn't incarcerating as many as Bush and Clinton did." Update [1 p.m.]: The impact of the prison explosion has been devastating. President Jimmy Carter writes today in an impassioned op-ed in the New York Times, calling for an end to the global drug war: In a message to Congress in 1977, I said the country should decriminalize the possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, with a full program of treatment for addicts. I also cautioned against filling our prisons with young people who were no threat to society, and summarized by saying: "Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself." The war on drugs has since done more to harm the black family and, consequently, the entire American family than ... any other drug.