Tag: opioid crisis

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Opinion The Last Word

2020: The Year We Grieved

CREDIT: Herbert Goetsch | Unsplash

I started this year as many do — ready to embark on new goals, embrace new beginnings, welcome a new year with hope. 2020 vision, we all said. What could go wrong?

My birthday is in January. I can’t remember what I did on what must have been an uneventful turn of age in 2020. February, too, is a bit of a blur. What marked the real start of this year — at least where my lasting memory of it will forever be marked — was grief.

A longtime friend overdosed on heroin in early March. She’d struggled with opioid addiction and substance abuse for years. I tried to help her through much of it, offering a place to stay, clothes and food when she’d lost everything (which was every few months), and connecting her to resources that could help with recovery. She had at least two false starts in rehab. After a couple months in the last one, she snuck out and had her final dance with a needle. I remember the moment I read the Facebook message: “I just wanted you to know that Kristin is in ICU in Methodist North from a heroin overdose. Doctor said that she will more than likely not make it.”

Herbert Goetsch | Unsplash

Looking with hope toward 2021

The punch in the pit of my gut, the pang in my heart, the panic. I spent the better part of that week at Methodist visiting my friend, who was in a coma, as doctors ran tests to be sure nothing else could be done, to sort out possible organ donation in the likely case that nothing could. Between my visits, the news was abuzz with the novel coronavirus. Cases had spread in Washington and it was beginning to look as though it was going to be a pretty big deal, even here. Face masks weren’t a thing yet, but every time I walked into the hospital, I wondered if I was at risk for COVID. Was someone infected there? Was this all being blown out of proportion? I stopped at sanitizing stations and rubbed my hands down to be safe.

At the end of an emotionally draining week, my friend was taken off life support. Her memorial service was the last large gathering I attended this year. I carried hand sanitizer, avoided hugs with anyone aside from Kristin’s mother, and winced when someone coughed or sneezed nearby. Had they not heard of coronavirus yet? There are too many people in this room, too close together, I thought.

I grieved for Kristin, of course, but not in the way I would have if it wouldn’t have coincided with the emergence of a worldwide pandemic. I’ve grieved for her throughout this year, but with no hugs, no face-to-face conversations with friends who knew and loved her, too. My sadness over her loss was inadvertently overridden by a new punch in the gut, a different type of panic — one I wasn’t familiar with at all. How many people will die? Will I die? How bad is this virus? How far will it spread?

As the next few months unfolded, we all grieved. We grieved for lost jobs, loved ones who succumbed to COVID. We grieved in the absence of friends and family, for the loss of “normalcy,” whatever that might have been. We pined for gatherings, concerts, theater outings, for any thread of hope that this mess would right itself. We longed for conversations, handshakes, workplace camaraderie, a beer at a damn bar. The world turned upside down, and we were given no clear instructions on how to best proceed. There was no united front.

In some ways, I’m relieved that Kristin’s struggle ended just before the world’s battle with COVID began. She’d likely have been on the streets, risking infections of all types, but perhaps especially the virus. She wouldn’t have had a safe haven like some of us have, nor easy access to soap and showers and sinks. There are many others like her — homeless, struggling with addiction or mental illness, isolated in the truest sense.

With all that’s been lost this year, I’m more grateful than ever for what I do have. A roof over my head, a job (though we’ve been working remotely since March and I miss the shit out of my co-workers), a partner who handles my COVID-fueled existential crises in stride, and so much more.

If you’re reading this now, you have survived this year, too. Perhaps we’ve been through the worst of it. At the very least, we can look at these broken pieces and be thankful for what’s left and how far we’ve come — and to look with hope toward 2021.

Shara Clark is managing editor of the Flyer.

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Opinion The Last Word

Take a Pass On Pot Criminalization

Before U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided last month to lead the Department of Justice in a crusade against marijuana, ending a lenient policy on the enforcement of federal pot laws, why didn’t anyone tell him that’s not such a great idea nor would it be very popular?

Not only is this move a step in the wrong direction and against the will of most Americans (61 percent based on a CBS News poll done last year), it’s a waste of time. And not just because people should be able to roll a j and enjoy it every now and then, but because, contrary to what Sessions has inferred, cannabis is not the devil and it’s not all that dangerous. It’s actually got some proven benefits with few drawbacks.

Alzheimer’s, PTSD, and Parkinson’s are just a few of the conditions that research has discovered marijuana can help with. But the number-one benefit of the sticky plant might be its ability to alleviate chronic pain.

Jeff Sessions

Chronic pain is something the National Institutes of Health says affects about 100 million Americans and leads thousands of doctors to prescribe dangerous and often addictive pain-killing (and mind-numbing) opioids. And when the pills run out, that doesn’t necessarily mean the brain and the body are done with the drug, sometimes causing people to turn to the streets to find their fix — a recipe for disaster.

According to the Center for Disease Control’s latest numbers, 48,000 people died from opioid-related incidents in 2016 — 48,000! That’s more than 10 times the number of U.S. troops that have been killed in Iraq since 2003. Opioids include anything from prescription painkillers to heroin to synthetic drugs like fentanyl (a drug that can be 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine).

Well, guess what? Marijuana doesn’t kill. Marijuana can help. In fact, the Drug Enforcement Administration reports that there are no recorded overdose deaths related to cannabis. And in states that have legalized medical marijuana, the number of opioid-related overdose deaths has decreased by just under 25 percent, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In a memo last month, Sessions said the purpose of returning to the previous policy of enforcing federal marijuana laws is “to disrupt criminal organizations, tackle the growing drug crisis, and thwart violent crime across our country.”

The drug crisis? Wait, there’s a pot crisis? I had no idea. There’s a few crises in this country, and I wouldn’t say the growing, selling, or use of weed is one. There might be a drug crisis in this country, but marijuana is far from the root of that problem.

Also, wouldn’t legalizing the plant cut down on these criminal organizations and violent crimes that Sessions speaks of? There’d be a smaller need to smuggle weed, kill for it, or illegally obtain it if it were legalized and widely accessible.

It’s unlikely that the change of policy will really have much effect, as the cannabis industry, both medical and recreational, is booming, with momentum, in 29 states and the District of Columbia. Also, the decision to crack down on the federal laws is still left up to local U.S. Attorneys, and many of them aren’t seeing eye to eye with Sessions on the issue.

Still, it seems like a waste of time and of potentially scarce government resources to pursue prosecution for cannabis offenses. There’s bigger fish that the DOJ could be frying, like working to fix the actual drug crisis surrounding opioid use, or perhaps the broken justice system or the mass incarceration of one in four black men in this country (which is exacerbated by strict marijuana possession laws in some states).

There’s research, numbers, and evidence that show marijuana is not the enemy, so why are Sessions and others still stuck on 1970s legislation? When will marijuana be removed from the DEA’s list of Schedule I drugs with the likes of heroin, LSD, and Ecstasy?

We’d be better off to just let the people puff, puff, pass in peace. Because good people do smoke weed, Jeff.

Maya Smith is a Flyer staff writer.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Marsha Blackburn’s “Unintended Consequences”

Sometimes in this trade, the act of choosing a headline can be a difficult matter. Not so in this case. The headline of this editorial happens to be the phrase used by 7th District U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn to describe the ill effects of a 2016 law she sponsored that loosened regulations on the prescription of addictive opioids, and it constitutes a wonderful irony.

Blackburn, now a declared Republican candidate for the soon-to-be-vacated U.S. Senate seat currently held by Bob Corker, has found herself in hot water as a result of her role in passing the law — as documented over the last weekend in a collaborative effort by the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes and the Washington Post newspaper.

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn

Fallout from the investigation has been enormous and immediate and bipartisan and potent enough to force the withdrawal of Pennsylvania GOP Congressman Tom Marino as President Trump’s nominee to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy as the nation’s Drug Czar. Marino found himself in sudden and unexpected disgrace after the CBS-WaPo revelations that he had been among a handful of members who zealously pushed through Congress the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016. As the investigation demonstrated, that innocuously titled measure, pushed by self-serving drug manufacturers, camouflaged provisions that, according to former Drug Enforcement Administration official Joe Rannazzisi, purposely struck down important sageguards. The result, he said, was that “unscrupulous” pain-pill hucksters gained the virtually unlimited ability to ply their trade and inflate the nation’s current opioid-addiction crisis to pandemic proportions.

Rannazzisi also told investigators that Marino and Blackburn, two of the bill’s 14 sponsors, had been especially active in pressing the DEA and the Justice Department to withhold their initial objections to the legislation, which went on to virtual unanimous passage by Congress.

But, speaking of unintended consequences, “virtual” is a crucial qualifying word. To what may well be Blackburn’s future discomfort, a likely opponent of hers in the forthcoming GOP Senatorial primary is former 8th District congressman Stephen Fincher, who, either by choice or happenstance, happened not to be in Washington when the 2016 vote on the bill was taken. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Fincher has elevated the burgeoning opioid-addiction crisis to the very top of his potential issues to run on. And whoever gets the Democratic nomination for the Senate is likely to follow suit.

As one of the 2016 bill’s prime movers, Blackburn finds herself in the uncomfortable position of having been either classically negligent in relation to the bill’s dangerous provisions or willing to overlook them in the service of drug companies that had been especially generous in their donations to her political benefit.

In any case, she — like other members of Congress who failed to interdict this pernicious measure — will have to provide some convincing explanations for their dereliction, and we can at least hope for some enlightenment on that score in next year’s campaign.