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A better way Editorial: Stop the carnage: Drug addicts need treatment, not prison sentences

Richmond Times-Dispatch - 4/15/2017

OPIOID CRISIS

Today's Commentary section is largely given over to the 10th anniversary of Virginia Tech, as it should be. That single searing morning has left deep scars in the commonwealth; remembrance and commemoration are not only appropriate, but necessary.

Here, however, we want to address another nightmare that has not yet ended - and is actually getting worse: drug overdoses.

Last year more than 1,400 Virginians died after overdosing on drugs, mainly opioids - an increase of 38 percent over the year before. More Virginians died from drug overdoses than from car accidents or firearms. Using an even grimmer metric - the number of deaths from Seung-Hui Cho's rampage 10 years ago - the rate of overdose deaths works out to the equivalent of almost one Virginia Tech per week.

***

While cocaine and Benzodiazepines (a class of drugs used to treat anxiety, seizures, and a variety of other problems) together account for roughly 500 fatalities, fentanyl accounts for more than 600, and copycat fentanyl accounts for another 102. Other prescription opiods took 469 lives; heroin took 448; and all opioids took 1,133 - roughly three-fourths of all overdose deaths last year. (The figures exceed the total number of fatalities because some users died with multiple drugs in their systems.)

Data from the Office of the State Medical Examiner show that the overdose rate from prescription opioids other than fentanyl has remained fairly steady over the past decade; heroin and non-prescription fentanyl have caused the dramatic spike in opioid deaths. State health commissioner Marissa Levine says officials are now seeing the appearance of carfentanil. Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin. Carfentanil is 100 times stronger than fentanyl - i.e, 5,000 times stronger than heroin. It is used to tranquilize elephants.

What to do?

***

Attorney General Jeff Sessions seems bent on returning the U.S. to the scorched-earth tactics of the War on Drugs: tough prosecutions, long sentences, zero tolerance, and just-say-no. That approach, which has racked up a cost of $1 trillion, is a proven failure.

The number of people in prison for drug crimes has risen from 40,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today. Yet the number of heroin users is now double what it was at the turn of the century. Drug overdose deaths have roughly doubled over that period as well. Methamphetamine use peaked around 2005, but it is still much higher today than it was in 2000.

"We cannot arrest our way out of this problem," says FBI director Jim Comey. He's right. So is the chief of police in Virginia Beach. "We've had a war on drugs," said James Cervera a couple of years ago. "We've lost miserably." (On page 4 of today's Commentary section, Chesterfield sheriff Karl Leonard suggests another approach.)

It should be intuitively obvious that society cannot cure addiction through incarceration, any more than it can cure cancer or diabetes that way. Indeed, the Virginia Department of Corrections recently had to tighten its visitation and mail policies in an effort to stem the flow of drugs into correctional institutions.

If the commonwealth can't even keep drugs out of prisons, it's absurd to think it can keep drugs out of schools, businesses, and communities. "Just say no" just doesn't work.

What does?

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Drug courts, for one thing. Multiple independent analyses have shown that diverting arrestees away from human storage units with guards into programs that focus on treatment and life skills reduces drug recidivism and other crimes, sometimes by as much as 40 percent.

Yet drug courts continue to struggle for funding. In February, Henrico's drug court stopped taking new participants because it was overloaded with cases. No wonder: The program can handle only about 60 participants at a time. But roughly 7 percent of Virginians over age 12 have used drugs in the past month, which would put the number of drug users in Henrico at more than 20,000.

Virginia needs to take money from incarceration and put it into drug courts. Then it needs to adopt an approach that treats drug use as a public health problem, as Portugal has. "Hardly anyone dies from a drug overdose in Portugal," noted The Washington Post a couple of years ago. Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001. Casual drug users are sent before a dissuasion commission. Addicts are sent to treatment.

As a result, Portugal has a fatal overdose rate of 3 people per 1 million residents.

Virginia's rate is 175 per 1 million.

It's time to try a new approach.