Posted by Jack
“Drug overdose, as a category, is now the leading cause of accidental death in the U.S., with 52,404 lethal drug overdoses in 2015. Driving this epidemic is addiction to heroin and other opioids. Of the 20.5 million Americans with a substance use disorder in 2015, 591,000 of them had a heroin use disorder. 12,990 overdose deaths were related to heroin.1 This is more than 300% of the 2010 statistics.”
Pretty bad stats, huh? Well, I’m not going to use heroin and nobody I know is going to use it. I know from life experience that a large percentage of the people who do try heroin for the first time (which is a felony) will not be committing a felony crime for the first time. Chances are good they’ve been around and have done some pretty heinous things and caused a lot of harm to society.
My experience says the types that will mess around with heroin are highly unlikely to do anything productive with their life and they will be significant threat to the well being of our society. That said, I fully acknowlege the rare exceptions, but in most cases these were already established people with a good future, who for reasons of seeking pain relief, get hooked on heroin. The junkies I’m talking about are those who were already into crime.
NIH tells us heroin addicts have about 97% failure rate in rehab. Heroin is a dead end, literally. By the time one reaches the age of accountability we should know this! So why do we ask the taxpayers to bend over once again to save these hopeless idiots? I wouldn’t call this a “crisis” -I would call it Darwin.
Okay, now my liberal friends, please tell me why I am being cold hearted and not looking at the bigger picture.
PS Where do you think most of the heroin enters the USA? Yep, you guessed it, coming right across the Mexican border.
There is absolutely nothing to prevent family, friends, churches, etc. from doing what they can to save addicts from themselves, I just don’t want to waste my tax dollars on them, and with a 97% failure rate…it is a waste. Better to provide them with all the free heroin they want and let natural selection take it’s course.
To the degree that US laws are broken, trafficking and selling, our government, federal, state, local, should be involved to secure our border, stop the flow, and arrest the law breakers.
Young people need to be educated…it is they who are causing this current “epidemic.”
Would that the organized left would put even half of their energies to teaching the truth about drug use instead of glorifying and promoting it…
I attended a memorial service for a friend’s husband over the weekend. This officer spent a lot of his personal time working with kids in the DARE program. One young lady got up to pay tribute to the man that “saved her life.” She is now an engineering student and she attributes her forward path and strong moral clarity to this fine man who “not only talked the talk but walked the walk in his everyday life.”
Education works!
As for the rest, as you wrote Jack, there’s not much anyone can do for them.
I can tell you a story about opiods. Maybe I will someday.
Sounds great…I hope soon!