Another news story about the “War on Drugs.”
I just read a county in Ohio had 24 overdoses in 48 hours. Is it me or does that seem a lot?
Jesus…
This not a rant about Trump, this mess goes back to Nixon. There is plenty of blame to share.
The war on drugs has got to end. It’s a dismal failure. It is part of a machine that needs to be dismantled.
This “war” has left us with an addicted population, a for profit prison system, a huge increase in gang violence, a heavily militarized police force and lot of dead bodies and some very sick people – and little else.
We are going to lose 60,000 people this year to addiction. A few years ago it was 30,000 and that was too far many. 60,000 people… That is the size of a small American city. Ponder that. That is Portland Maine or Pontiac Michigan, Muncie Indiana, or Daytona Florida gone… just gone.
Ghost towns.
Everybody dead.
I cannot imagine the panic in the streets and declaring of war and chest pounding and saber rattling we’d be hearing if this much death was caused by ISIS or Al Qeada.
I know the grandmother of a baby born addicted to heroin. Every 25 minutes, in this country alone, a baby is addicted to heroin, or cocaine, Percocet or a slew of other opiates. I hear nothing… Silence.
I see people raising money through crowd funding for their cat, or for a birthday party for their kid. Maybe some of those are legitimate, but when I try to raise money to help an addicted baby?
… silence.
Someone suggested the resistance is people are worried the money might go back to the “junkie mom…” maybe that is a legitimate concern. But that’s where it stops. That is where all this stops. It stops at wall of concern or worry or ignorance and we proceed to turn our backs, turn on the TV and wait for ISIS to attack us.
I simply wish people would start demanding solutions to the threat is killing us, killing our friends and kids and families and stop being sucked into the fear machine that the government and the news media feeds us every fucking day.
Globally – the entire world – you are three times more likely to die from a lightening strike as you are from ISIS.
The president wants 54 billion more for defense. That’s not my issue here, let him have it. Let him have 100 billion. My issue is simply we need to start demanding funding – a lot of funding – goes toward rehabilitation and education, we need to fund and find real solutions to this situation that is killing us. We need to stop the endless cycle of jail and ineffective rehab and jail and rehab. We need to end the criminalization of a sickness and start treating it like a disease that is killing us.
In the handful of minutes you took to read this someone in the US died from addiction.
No one is going to die today or tomorrow or this month, or probably, hopefully, this year from ISIS or al Qaeda.
We need to stop being afraid of the Boogie man and deal with the drug problem like intelligent adults, not imbecile politicians. We need solutions, not bombs and rhetoric.
We need to tell everyone, from the President of the United States down to the local mayors and village board members, they can feed their war machine and buy as many ships and airplanes and bombs as they feel they need to, but we need some attention to what is really killing us.
A trillion dollars for infrastructure repair? That is fantastic! I’m all for it, but we need to start the discussion about addiction and stop taking about this idiotic war on drugs as if it is a solution.
The war in drugs has to end. It’s a war on us and it’s a failure.
And it is killing us, at an ever increasing rate.
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