Opioid Solutions - Indiana Lacks Imagination

 Let me preface what follows with a rant. I feel grumpy, even if I did have the best night's sleep in a week. The following article follows on a conversation I had with my sister on Thursday about her eldest son, who has had an opioid problem before the epidemic, and my friend CC who had a crack cocaine problem for half of her life, and the ineffectiveness of treatment offered in Indiana. Which feeds into my disgruntlement with Indiana - a perennial thing, that nowadays I feel no inhibitions on voicing - as being run in a manner counter-productive for its citizens. This cold, dark morning, I think we have let too many of our best and brightest leave the state to prove it's a good thing to be from Indiana, which has left us with the dull, the witless, the unimaginative running our public lives. Then, too, there is the marijuana news I reported on in my Beware Coming to Indiana With Medical Marijuana!. Of course, I can say this knowing no one reads these screeds. It does not change the need to say these things.

From The Guardian I ran across, ‘Gets police out of the lives of drug users’: decriminalization move takes effect in Canadian province.

 ast Hastings Street in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has long been the epicenter of Canada’s deadly opioid crisis. For years, lines of tents, discarded needles and open drug use have been common sights.

Residents of the neighbourhood have repeatedly called for a radical change to the government’s approach to illegal drugs, particularly since a recent spate of overdose deaths.

This week, they got their wish. An exemption came into effect on Wednesday, allowing any resident of the province of British Columbia to possess 2.5 grams of ecstasy, crack, cocaine or heroin – and even the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl – without fear of criminal charge.

The province will no longer arrest, prosecute, fine or jail drug users, nor will it seize their drugs.

###

Police officers in Vancouver will now offer drug users “health service referral cards”, designed to encourage them to seek treatment.

The new change puts British Columbia in rare company: in North America, only the state of Oregon has abandoned criminal prohibitions for drug possession. Internationally, only a handful of countries take a similar, health-centric approach to narcotics.

Does this not sound like Indiana?

The upswing of deaths in Canada and the US did not correlate to an increase in drug use, but a change in the drug supply.

Around 2016, the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl began hitting the streets. At first, it filtered into the supply of heroin and other drugs, but it has increasingly become a sought-after drug on its own. By weight, fentanyl costs the same as heroin, but is orders of magnitude more powerful.

Some more local headlines: Muncie man charged with murder in fatal overdose case, 'An alarming trend' Police: Anderson infant’s death is latest in string of fentanyl tragedies, and     Anderson woman charged after 170 grams of fentanyl found.

Now compare this paragraph from Indiana overdose deaths reach record high for second consecutive year:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its provisional report on overdose deaths in 2021 across the United States. In Indiana, the number hit a record high for a second year in a row: an estimated 2,755 Hoosiers died of drug overdoses.

“Eighty-five percent of those are due to fentanyl,” said Douglas Huntsinger, the state’s executive director for drug prevention, enforcement and treatment.

The estimated 2,755 deaths represent a 21-percent jump from 2020, when lockdowns and the coronavirus pandemic pushed Indiana overdose deaths to a then-record of 2,272. Before 2020, the high was 1,835, set in 2017.

with this from The Guardian's article:

 The change was prompted by a staggering death toll: since 2016, the opioid crisis has killed more than 33,000 Canadians, with British Columbia bearing the brunt of the deaths. In 2022, the province saw 2,300 deaths, making it and the year before the joint deadliest on record.

British Columbia lost fewer people than did Indiana, but took stronger action. Indiana's General Assembly concerns itself with abortion, saying they are pro-life, when will they act to protect these addicts. Oh, they will not. Life does not really matter out of the womb, people are too messy for ideological pigeonholes. 

Outside of B.C., the Canadians have done better than us in how they treat their citizens:

Despite his enthusiasm in legalizing cannabis, and regulating its production, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, has opposed broader decriminalization.

But Trudeau’s government has greenlit a series of pilot projects that prescribe opioid and opioid analogues to drug users, in hopes that a regulated, legal and consistent supply of the drugs would reduce those accidental poisonings and overdoses.

A shock received since I arrived in Muncie of which I have not yet recovered is the blasé way that people talk about so-and-so having died of an overdoes, or of relatives fiending over painkillers, or overdoes in convenience store bathrooms.

I passed The Guardian article onto my sister, who wrote me the following in response:

Yes decriminalization I feel is not the answer in the  way they  are doing it.   Addicts need recovery programs.  I have said upon arrest for drug use they need a separate  place from jail, and detox them and do recovery, counseling not prison or jail

sch 2/4