The Seattle Times’ Jennifer Sullivan is usually a quality reporter. She covers the police and crime beat, examining tough issues from different perspectives. But when drugs entered the picture in her article on Oxycontin today, as often happens when the Times covers drug issues, sensibility went up in smoke.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit I’m biased when I cover drug policy and enforcement. Because punitive drug policy has been a disaster. We have a worst case scenario: long prison terms, full prisons, highly financed organized crime, tons of enforcement resources, misinformation from the government, billions of dollars spent each year, and almost nothing left for treatment. And what do have to show for it? Some of the highest drug abuse rates in the world. The Netherlands, which tolerates most drug use and prioritizes harm reduction, has substantially lower usage rates than the U.S. Our drug policy is a failure.
But you’d never know it by reading this article by Sullivan – who, I’ll say again, is a usually great reporter – which uses trite scare tactics and pushes more of the same bad policy.
They’re breaking into nursing homes, storming pharmacies with guns drawn, forging prescriptions and holding homeowners captive while rummaging through their medicine cabinets.
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), prescription-drug abuse is quickly closing in on marijuana as the country’s most popular illicit drug. Nearly 7 million Americans abused prescription drugs in 2007 — an 80 percent increase since 2000, according to DEA statistics.
Seattle police Capt. Mike Meehan said that his detectives investigated about 100 drug-forgery cases in 2007. But with the crime resulting in a maximum of only six months in jail for a first-time offender, Meehan said, there is no real deterrent for people not to forge a doctor’s signature.
Meehan said he plans to ask the Legislature to not only pass stiffer penalties for people convicted of prescription forgery.
Look, there’s no question that Oxycontin abuse is a bad thing. It is. But there is a question about how to deal with it. In this article, Sullivan begins with stories of addicts breaking into nursing homes and segues to the need for longer prison terms and stricter rules. You’d think our options were to sit on our hands and get robbed by junkies or ratchet up the prison terms for drug offenders—that tougher penalties are the only way society has discovered to reduce drug abuse. But this is sort of false dilemma and fear mongering from the government’s lips to the MSM’s fingertips to the reader to their elected representatives that has justified creating ineffective, inhumane, wasteful policies since this ill-conceived drug war began.
In this article, why not talk to doctors who treat opiate addictions? Or interview harm-reduction professional and public-health workers? How about someone at the state’s Department of Alcohol and Substance Abuse who can describe our under-funded treatment programs that have month-long waiting lists and the desperate need for more funding? You know, the stuff that actually solves drug abuse problems.
