The War is Back

The war on drugs is back on.

I get the reason for this grandstanding, the government needs to be seen to be doing something to stop these crushing deaths, but evidence, 50 years of evidence suggests that this is not the way to go.

Biden spoke of it in his SOTU address, yup the man who coined the term Drug Czar, who vowed to help… clearly won’t. The Director of the Drug Policy Alliance pushed back.

And last week the HALT Fentanyl Act (HR467) was passed.
It seems a good idea but the dangerous fallout will be far reaching.

The ins and outs are discussed in this plea to reconsider from more than 150 groups who know this shit better than I… (check that list out) and led by Maritza Perez Medina, Director of the Office of Federal Affairs of the Drug Policy Alliance.
Their plea was ignored.

They passed it all the same and now it seems the signal is that we are entering a new carceral era scheduling all fentanyl analogues as Class I, meaning that they have no therapeutic use.

This Act seems clumsy, driven by headlines that are ‘informed by mythology rather than science’ at a time when we need nuance.

It is feared that it will hinder study of the substances on the street at a time when we need speedier not slower feedback so we can keep the updates coming on how to respond.

I get it, they have been playing whack-a-mole to keep up with the various fentanyl analogues but to ban all analogues is nuts.
And it was news to me that not all fentanyl analogues have abuse potential or are harmful and apparently some even have a therapeutic and naloxone-like effect.

But just as fentanyl was a response to the clamp down on heroin and prescription opioids (thanks for that guys), the illicit drug market is already ahead of the game with non fentanyl shit like Xylazine (a veterinary sedative used in large animals that suppresses breathing and heart rate) and benzodiazepine analogues (neither are reversible with naloxone) and Nitazines, which are opioids 20x stronger than fentanyl (naloxone will reverse these).
And so a new round of whack-a-mole begins.

Why do we need the HALT Act when, if the criminal approach is your gig, we already have The Controlled Substance Analogue Act of 1986?

You can not police your way out of this because policing has no impact on the demand, say the former undercover drug cops.

What we really need is for Congress to support treatment and overdose prevention and so stem the demand by getting behind the STOP Fentanyl Act of 2021 (HR2366), which proposes increased access to harm reduction, sorely under prescribed medical assisted treatment, data collection and other evidence based methods to stop the deaths.
And the TEST Act which supports research and data without backsliding into criminal reform.

I get it, HALT Fentanyl sounds fabulous, but if saving lives is your goal, it won’t work.
We know that from past mistakes. It is the definition of madness.

Liz Komar, sentencing reform counsel for the Sentencing Project states
"If mandatory minimums and harsh sentences made communities safer, the overdose crisis would not have occurred”.

This threat of automatic harsh minimum sentences will scare co-users from seeking help during an overdose and people will die, like my Luke.

Susan Ousterman who founded the Vilomah Memorial Foundation after the death of her boy, Tyler in 2020 gets the last word here because she nails it:
"It's incredibly disheartening to see the president co-opting the grief of mothers like me in an attempt to increase penalties, rather than prioritizing the health measures that are desperately needed to save lives."