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Last Tuesday, Beto O'Rourke held a small gathering at Keene State College in New Hampshire. The memorable topic of discussion was the war on drugs, while O'Rourke complained about racial disparities in drug lawsuits and the recent explosion of opioid overdoses in New Hampshire.
It is reasonable to promote the legalization of marijuana to combat racial injustices, but its description of the opioid crisis is terribly misinformed.
O'Rourke advocated for the imprisonment of Purdue Pharma executives, saying that "the vast majority of opioid addicts today began with a legal order. [Purdue] leaders understood the addictive properties of [OxyContin] and did not share that with the public, and not a single one of them made a single day in jail. "But this statement lacks proper context.
Yes, more opioid addicts started with prescribed opioids – but not by their doctor. Sure 78 percent OxyContin has never been prescribed to drug addicts because the pharmaceutical opioids that often precede addiction are usually diverted from legitimate sources and consumed by addicts already addicted to drugs. Purdue announced that OxyContin had a 1% dependency ratio – but studies show that the demand was actually conservative.
The notion that Purdue Pharma and prescribed opioids have caused the overdose crisis is patently false. New Hampshire, for example, has hardly increased overdose deaths from opioids between 1999 and 2012, despite the increase in opioids prescription rate during the same period. But after doctors were forced to reduce the prescription after being forced to participate in New Hampshire's prescription drug monitoring program in 2012, the overdose mortality rate had tripled in five years.
Government officials and the media have still not acknowledged that the drug and mental health services administration has reported consistent non-medical (opioid) painkillers rate of use since 2002, which calls into question any idea that the pharmaceutical industry is more addictive. But this ignorance could be supported by the implications of the alternative narrative: If the increase in the number of opioid-related deaths has been caused by a constant number of opioid users using more dangerous black market substances after being deprived of their legal prescriptions for drugs. opioids, government interventions to reduce prescriptions could be the real culprit of the crisis.
Although O'Rourke praises the erroneous standard narrative surrounding opioid use, he nonetheless presented ideas that need further discussion:
"[America] has the largest prison population on the planet, made up disproportionately of people of color, far too much for the possession of a legal substance in most states of the country, marijuana. And although Americans of all races and ethnicities use marijuana at
same rate, only some are more likely than others to be arrested, to serve their sentence, to be forced, after their release, to tick a box in order to obtain this job because of their past conviction, ineligible for loans students and scholarships [Keene State] and better themselves. We need a real reform of the criminal justice system. We must end the ban on marijuana. "
the The data could support this point.
Beto O'Rourke showed great charisma by announcing his candidacy and is now at the top of the primary Democratic primary. But if O'Rourke wants to maintain his success, he will need a nuanced perspective of the opioid crisis ravaging America.
J.J. Rich (@jacobjamesrich) is a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation.
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