Rethinking the War on Drugs in the Age of Opioid Addicted Europeans

I don't see racism everywhere I look. In my view, most issues are far too complex for "race" to serve as a dominant explanatory factor.

That said, it's rather stunning to see the recent tsunami of news articles (like this one recent news piece from NPR) taking the position that as people of European descent become an ever bigger percentage of drug addicts, throwing their asses in jail is no longer trendy as a first-choice paradigm for addressing the problem. Almost overnight, in this age of opioid addiction, compassionate treatment has become "common sense."

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Alcohol-Related Deaths: More Than a Big Number

The following excerpt is from an article at Gizmodo: "Alcohol Is Killing More Americans Than Ever."

More and more Americans are drinking themselves to death. A new study this week finds there were around 72,000 alcohol-related deaths among people over the age of 16 in 2017—more than double the number of similar deaths recorded two decades earlier.

When an airplane crashes, killing 200 people, we get upset and we demand to know how airplanes can be made more safe. When the equivalent of 360 airplanes filled with people die of alcohol use each year, we shrug. We shrug even though every one of these alcohol deaths affects many other people, including members of the dead person's immediate family. We shrug even though for each death, there are many living alcoholics out there destroying precious relationships they used to have with their loved ones.

Gizmodo based its article on a study published January 7, 2020.  Here is an excerpt:

The number of alcohol‐related deaths per year among people aged 16+ doubled from 35,914 to 72,558, and the rate increased 50.9% from 16.9 to 25.5 per 100,000. Nearly 1 million alcohol‐related deaths (944,880) were recorded between 1999 and 2017. In 2017, 2.6% of roughly 2.8 million deaths in the United States involved alcohol. Nearly half of alcohol‐related deaths resulted from liver disease (30.7%; 22,245) or overdoses on alcohol alone or with other drugs (17.9%; 12,954). . . . The largest annual increase occurred among Non-Hispanic White females. Rates of acute alcohol‐related deaths increased more for people aged 55 to 64, but rates of chronic alcohol‐related deaths, which accounted for the majority of alcohol‐related deaths, increased more for younger adults aged 25 to 34

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Addiction as dysfunctional Bonding – TED talk by Jonathan Hari

Wonderful TED talk by Journalist Jonathan Hari. Two Quotes stand out:

Professor Peter Cohen in the Netherlands said, maybe we shouldn't even call it addiction. Maybe we should call it bonding. Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we're happy and healthy, we'll bond and connect with each other, but if you can't do that, because you're traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. . . . And I think the core of that message -- you're not alone, we love you -- has to be at every level of how we respond to addicts, socially, politically and individually. For 100 years now, we've been singing war songs about addicts. I think all along we should have been singing love songs to them, because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.
-- See also, Rachel Wurzman's TED talk: How Isolation Fuel's Opiod Addiction.
The effects of social disconnection through opioid receptors, the effects of addictive drugs and the effects of abnormal neurotransmission on involuntary movements and compulsive behaviors all converge in the striatum. And the striatum and opioid signaling in it has been deeply linked with loneliness. 09:48 When we don't have enough signaling at opioid receptors, we can feel alone in a room full of people we care about and love, who love us. Social neuroscientists, like Dr. Cacioppo at the University of Chicago, have discovered that loneliness is very dangerous. And it predisposes people to entire spectrums of physical and mental illnesses. 10:16 Think of it like this: when you're at your hungriest, pretty much any food tastes amazing, right? So similarly, loneliness creates a hunger in the brain which neurochemically hypersensitizes our reward system. And social isolation acts through receptors for these naturally occurring opioids and other social neurotransmitters to leave the striatum in a state where its response to things that signal reward and pleasure is completely, completely over the top. And in this state of hypersensitivity, our brains signal deep dissatisfaction. We become restless, irritable and impulsive.

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Lack of human connectedness as the cause of “addiction”

This article at Huffpo argues that addiction cannot be found as internal chemical hooks, but rather as a symptom of human boredom and isolation:

The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did. At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was -- at the same time as the Rat Park experiment -- a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about the head home when the war ended. But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers -- according to the same study -- simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more.

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