Help Could Be On The Way

There is an opiate epidemic in progress in the US and it is murdering more people than guns do.

Having surpassed gun homicides for the first time in 2015, the epidemic of heroin and opioid related deaths in the US continues to grow. Amid the dismal failure of the ‘war on drugs’, it seems US lawmakers are finally waking up to reality, and are pressing the nation’s drug czar for more data on the dangerous synthetic opioid fentanyl, including how it is trafficked and how many people it has killed, in the latest effort to thwart a spiraling drug crisis.

Steven Spicer, Donald Trump’s Press Secretary, is sure he knows the cause of the uptick in deaths. Spicer stated:

“I think that when you see something like the opioid addiction crisis blossoming in so many states around this country, the last thing we should be doing is encouraging people (by regulating the adult use of recreational marijuana).”

I think this is another case of drugs making people stupid, because the evidence does not back his claim.

…a widely publicized study in the esteemed Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine reported that the enactment of medical marijuana legalization laws is associated with year-over-year reductions in opioid analgesic overdose mortality. Overall, researchers determined, “States with medical cannabis laws had a 24.8 percent lower mean annual opioid overdose mortality rate compared with states without medical cannabis laws.”

The JAMA study is hardly unique. A 2015 examination by investigators at the RAND Corporation similarly determined, “[S]tates permitting medical marijuana dispensaries experience a relative decrease in both opioid addictions and opioid overdose deaths compared to states that do not.”

There are links to many more studies at the article linked.

And then we have reports of the US Military guarding the opium fields in Afghanistan. If we are having a Drug War why would the US Military be guarding opium fields in Afghanistan? It doesn’t make logical sense. But there may be a reason. And the reason has to do with the Black Budget of a US Government Agency officially tasked with lying. As opposed to the usual gratuitous lies we get from government.

It looks to me like Steven Spicer should stop getting his information exclusively from government sources.

And the Government as an enemy of the people? It is a very old story. “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” – Thomas Jefferson