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Lowered Fentanyl overdoses

There are plenty of privately run ‘residential workcamps’ for addiction recovery. Many have been controversial in taking advantage of the working residents and providing little to no treatment or using questionable protocols such as Cenikor and Granite Recovery. These groups charge entrance fees, receive government and insurance funding and keep most of the earned income from overtime workweeks that leave no time for whatever they call therapy. These groups have labor contracts with businesses and residents may work with outside employees for a small fraction of the going salary, which is collected by the group for ‘expenses’. The program completion rate is 56% with high recidivism. The recidivism rate of completed programees is almost one third. The problem is the money becomes the focus of these groups and the therapy can be wacky (group scream/shaming and shunning for example) and problematic. Some groups are better than others, those are super duper pricey and out of reach for most. The existing professional mental health system has great approaches but is too unobtainable financially for most and many more therapists would be a good thing.

I'm not in favor of privately owned prisons or workcamps. iT should all be government run. I'm all for locking up the addicted in one manner or the other. Our society should absolutely not have to accept addicts fucking up neighborhoods and the crimes they commit.
 
addiction is a disease of the brain.
Once some people pick up it is like a light is triggered for them and they can not stop. With a willingness and treatment, they can live productive lives.

Addiction begins with a choice except for the few who are born to mothers who were addicted or those who were forced to imbibe against their will. Both a very small fraction of the addicted overall. Call it whatever you want after that that choice, but that's what it is. Life is difficult for everyone, no one escapes that, but most of us dont make that bad choice. Most addicts are a scourge to society and just like we shouldnt allow the severely mentally ill to walk freely in society, neither should addicts. Age is irrelevant in that.
 
Applying societal scourge to all addicts sounds like hyperbolic thinking. I am not a mental health pro and love that those who know are offering their crucial insights here. Those without addictive tendencies in their brain often have difficulty grasping the altered concept of choice in an affected brain and how it may link within the nervous system. It seems for many, that depending on the substance abused, most addictions are only a scourge to one’s own life. Not all addicts steal and plunder or have physically abusive behavior, broken families, poverty and disease. Most just have lives of quiet desperation and wish to cease their addiction. Many addicts are hyper functional, especially those hooked on caffeine. Building state of the art mental health facilities that are actually accessible would be money better spent than simply imprisoning people for life. Trotting out ye olde bootstrap theory still doesn’t apply to those with no mental bootstraps or who need help to create and use them.
 
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How about approaching addiction from another angle?
Cut off the supply?
I know, the old “war on drugs” that has never worked.

But what if we went after the drug cartels and the whole supply chain into this country? The problem has always been they are outside the US so we can’t touch them.
But busting low level street dealers doesn’t do anything either.

But to just give up and let the drugs continue to be manufactured and shipped here to addict millions ?

There’s got to be a better way.

If a kid lives next to a candy store he’ll be tempted to go there no matter his parents say or do.
But if the candy store is eliminated…
 
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Elimination would of course be helpful, but as long as there is demand, there will be supply. The demand side of the equation carries more weight. There are many effective therapies, but they take time and money. Effective treatment to eliminate addiction would be money best spent imo. Should there be no alcohol because some can’t control their behavior? That’s how some places do it, then they switch to opium.
 
maybe one thing they do different is not lock people up?

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Federal Prisons: Drug offenses account for nearly half (approx. 45-47%) of sentences being served in USA federal prisons.”

be that as it may, I’m sure that utopia here in the USA is achievable if we would only just send a few more of the people we despise to prison. :x
 
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Underreporting/undermonitoring is a thing. Where I go to in south BFE in the Amazon they make their own alcohol and grow a plant to smoke, there’s ayuhuasca, coca and other herbs are used. Yes there are alcoholics and smokers and drug addicts but there is no recordkeeping. Even births aren’t always recorded in these places.
 
One factor is our unfortunate geography being so close to the Mexican drug cartels and their cross-border availability.
And people here have, or can get, more money for drugs unlike people in countries like Niger or Chad on the bottom of the list.
 
Dealers are just providing a popular service. Focusing on dealers is a large part of the reason the war on drugs has been a colossal failure. The focus should be on the drug addicts. Personally I'm for locking up the addicted and placing them in workcamps.
Education is a lot cheaper than jail, back in the 80's, heroin use was practically eliminated. That was due to educating kids before they got addicted.
Same with smoking, back in the 70's, more than 50% of adults smoked, then they started an aggressive campaign of educating kids and it was very effective.

Meanwhile, drinking and driving was addressed, but not the dangers of drinking, the liquor lobby saw to that.
 
I agree that early education away from drug use is key although the Just Say No and DARE programs haven’t been very effective.
Our society seems to accept drug useage more than other countries.
 
I agree that early education away from drug use is key although the Just Say No and DARE programs haven’t been very effective.
Our society seems to accept drug useage more than other countries.
Qui bono?


“[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” Haldeman wrote. “The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

That system turned out to be the War on Drugs, with marijuana being put in the same category as such drugs as heroin and morphine. Nixon’s White House counsel, John Ehrlichman, verified the intention of the War on Drugs in a 1995 interview with author Dan Baum, author of Smoke and Mirrors: The war on drugs and the politics of failure.

“Look, we understood we couldn’t make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure,” Ehrlichman confessed. “We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn’t resist it.”

That irresistible urge has cost more than a trillion dollars, destroyed countless lives, and created a prison industry that is bursting at the seams. There is so much money in the system, from federal dollars to those taken from arrestees through forfeiture laws that law enforcement is loath to let it go. But the battle against the War on Drugs just got some major reinforcements from the NAACP."
 
I think that criminalizing marijuana and declaring it to be just as bad as heroin was largely influenced by the liquor lobby, they didn't want people moving to Marijuana from alcohol.

Our lobbying system at work.

It was likely influenced by racism back in the 70's, as well.
 
I think that criminalizing marijuana and declaring it to be just as bad as heroin was largely influenced by the liquor lobby, they didn't want people moving to Marijuana from alcohol.

Our lobbying system at work.

It was likely influenced by racism back in the 70's, as well.
It goes back to the early 20th century. And has been 100% targeted at black and hispanic communities.
 
Up until the 1960's pot use was a federal offence. Caught and you'd serve your sentence at Leavenworth Penitentiary. But as the Counterculture came into being in the late 60's and the sons of White senators were being caught smoking pot the laws were lessened.
 
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