Mike Adams
Natural News
February 3, 2014
Street heroin is devastating America today. The heroin overdose death of creative genius Philip Seymour Hoffman –
found dead today with
a needle in his arm and “Ace of Spaces” heroin in his hotel room —
underscores the urgent need for radical reforms that would
decriminalize, regulate and assert strict quality control requirements
over recreational street drugs.
Image: Philip Seymour Hoffman (Wikimedia Commons).
It wasn’t the heroin itself that killed Philip Seymour Hoffman, you see: it was the
unpredictability of the potency of heroin that’s manufactured, distributed and retailed in an
unregulated underground economy which has no quality standards and no accountability to its customers and users.
The War on Drugs is an absolute failure
At first glance to the simple minded, the heroin-induced death of a
beloved actor might seem justification for an urgent call to escalate
the War on Drugs with an even greater degree of police intervention,
state surveillance and expansion of the world’s largest prison system.
Yet such decades-long efforts did nothing to prevent to death of
Hoffman, and in many ways they undoubtedly contributed to it. When an
in-demand chemical product cannot be legally regulated, controlled and
distributed alongside medical treatment protocols for addiction, it
inevitably falls into the hands of underground operators who, almost by
definition, exhibit zero quality control standards and are steeped in a
culture of violence and criminality.
And that means the heroin which people like Hoffman are able to
acquire is unpredictable: it may be contaminated with toxic substances,
combined with physiological multipliers that enhance toxicity, cut with
deadly fillers, or dosed with dangerously wide variability to the point
where users have no idea how much of the
drug they’re
really getting with each injection. Every dose is a roll of the dice,
and far too frequently that gamble ends in tragedy.
How the war on drugs makes drugs even more deadly
The drug war has failed to keep recreational drugs out of the hands
of substance abusers all across America, and in its failure it has
vastly
increased the toxicity of those drugs to
the point where the drugs are increasingly deadly. Remember: Hoffman’s
overdose was not a suicide. This was an addict who believed he was
simply getting another day’s fix. He had no intention of killing
himself.
If street drugs like heroin could be decriminalized, regulated,
controlled and distributed in a medical context along with serious
addiction treatment protocols, those who choose to abuse the drug would,
at the very least, be able to count on consistent dosing and drug
composition. Shifting the massive demand for recreational drugs out of
the hands of shady criminal operations and into the hands of pharmacies,
clinics and addiction treatment centers is not only medically justified
but morally and ethically demanded. It also has the revolutionary side
effect of causing the economic collapse of drug gangs (and all their
violence).
Substance addiction is not a criminal mindset; it is a medical addiction.
But by forcing substance addicts to deal with the criminal underground,
we condemn them to precisely the kind of toxicity and unpredictability
that killed Hoffman.
Hoffman’s death is an urgent call for a sane drug policy in America
Hoffman’s untimely and tragic death is yet another urgent reminder
that our current drug policies in America — all based on an utterly
failed, cruel and outmoded paradigm of criminality — must urgently
change.
Nobody wishes to see anyone use heroin, meth, crank or other “hard”
street drugs, yet people are going to use them one way or another
regardless of what the rest of us wish. If we hope to see fewer of these
people die from drug poisoning and
overdose, we must find a way to heavily regulate, control and prescribe these synthetic molecules to addicts
in conjunction with compassionate addiction treatment programs that treat these addicts as human beings who need help rather than felony criminals who need prison time.
Let Hoffman’s
death serve
to remind us all, yet again, that federal drug policy in the USA can
never work as it is currently configured. Drug addiction is a medical
issue, not a criminal issue, and until it is treated as such, the War on
Drugs will continue to waste billions of dollars while unnecessarily
destroying millions of lives.
This article was posted: Monday, February 3, 2014
