So how bad is this opioid thing?
• Greg Hughes, speaker of the Utah House, is openly encouraging government attorneys to sue Fortune 500 corporations, hardly a conventional strategy for a die-hard Republican.
• Poll after poll shows three quarters of the state, and more than half of Mormons, are down with legalizing marijuana for medical purposes. And it’s not glaucoma patients driving the numbers. It is the relatives of people trying to ease off opioids with marijuana. Their willingness is backed by data that shows overdoses decline in states with legal medical marijuana.
Even in the land of clean living, better stoned than dead.
Such is the sweeping effect of opiates and their synthetic cousin, opioids. The scourge has penetrated all walks of life, often starting with a sports injury or surgical procedure and ending with a needle in an arm and a heart that stops beating. It is viewed as a national crisis, and Utah’s overdose rate has consistently exceeded the national average.
Even the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is trying to adapt. DEA officials and the Utah Attorney General’s Office recently announced rollout of its DEA 360 program in Utah, the ninth jurisdiction in the country to join the effort. DEA and Utah officials say the new effort aims to reduce drug use by targeting distributors with increased enforcement while targeting users with increased education.
“We’re going after dealers so there are less users,” Utah’s DEA special agent in charge said when the program was announced.
That sounds a lot like the old approach at DEA, which for decades has led the nation’s expensive and unsuccessful effort to curb drug use by trying to cut off supply.
If we’re really still thinking we can shut down the drug pipeline by spending more money on interdiction, recent numbers released by the Utah Department of Public Safety may offer a reality check. The department reported last week that its agents and Utah Highway Patrol troopers stopped 226 vehicles carrying narcotics this year. In addition to marijuana and methamphetamine, 46 pounds of heroin and 1,100 pills were seized.
Only 1,100 pills? That could be a monthly total for one abuser. And 46 pounds of heroin likely is not even 1 percent of what gets consumed in Utah.
The lasting solution is to reduce the demand for drugs, and that isn’t easy. It takes good treatment programs and a social safety net to get people into those programs. Even then, some will still die. But if we spend more on reducing the number of addicts, we’ll be hitting the suppliers right where it counts.