current-events-drug-epidemic

=**Drug Epidemic in America**=

President Trump declared today that the opioid crisis, opioid crisis is a public health emergency. OK, so that means that in the states they can use federal money in more sophisticated, not sophisticated, in different ways, each state, to fight the heroin and OxyContin and opioid problem. It kills 100 Americans a day. Now, I just want to reiterate what I've said in the past, maybe and take it to a different place. We are living in a world where drugs are cheap. They don't cost a lot. All right. And where the demand for drugs is enormous. People want to intoxicate themselves not only with opioids but with marijuana, with alcohol, with substance. All right. Tremendous demand in America and the drugs are getting in. OK. A lot of them. So it's a huge business. Huge violent business and people are dying. Now, how do you stop the business? With the demand being so huge, it's impossible, just like prohibition. Remember in the 30s, the federal government passed a law that alcohol was illegal in the USA. Can you believe it? It was ultimately repealed because the bootleggers brought it all in from Canada and everybody got bombed just as they had, it cost a little bit more, but so many people ignored the law that it didn't work. So they repealed it, prohibition. With heroin and hard drugs, methamphetamine and cocaine, it's a little bit different because alcohol you can have a drink and not get intoxicated. You can have a beer or a glass of wine, a Scotch, whatever, and you're still in control of your faculties. In fact, they test you on the road, and your blood alcohol level has to be above a certain point in order for you to be charged. Opioids, you're stoned, OK, you're out no matter what you use. It's that heavy. Same thing with marijuana, it's so concentrated now that you ingest that you're altered, your mind is altered. Therefore, it becomes a public safety issue. All right, the first public safety issue is what will people on drugs do to you? Drunk driving, crime, all kinds of things. All right. That's number one. Number two, what do drug addicts and alcoholics do to themselves and their families? The damage is incalculable. So, enormous problem. The government can help solve it. But has never been able to find the right strategy. When I was at the Kennedy School at Harvard I did my main paper on drug demand and how to deal with it. And as part of the research I cited Singapore, the country of Singapore, a very small country, but had a huge drug problem because it's in Asia and heroin and opium are traditionally used in the area. So what the fascist government of Singapore did, and it was a fascist government, they said to their people, if we find out that you are using illegal drugs, so if a police officer drug tests you, which they're allowed to do there for no cause, by the way, and you have opiates in your bloodstream, you have to go to rehab. We put you in a rehabilitation center for 22 months. 22 months you're out, you're off the street. Took the market right away. There was nobody to sell to because the cops know who the drug addicts are. They're rounding them up, putting them in force rehab, forced rehab not very nice. And they sat there for 22 months and the pushers had nobody to sell to. In addition, the government of Singapore said, if we find you with a certain amount of drugs on you we'll assume you're a dealer and you could be hung, hanged, we'll execute you. It's a capital offense. So the risk reward, forget it. Drug problem in Singapore, zero. I took a car from Singapore and I drove over the causeway to Malaysia, which doesn't have any of this. You could see into Malaysia, the first town, all the drug addicts lined up on the streets. I assume they were Singaporeans living in Malaysia. But they were all over the place. And you drive back into Singapore and there's not one, you don't see anybody on the street like that, because they don't want to be in forced rehab. Now in America you can't do that. All right. The ACLU will be all over the place. There's voluntary rehab, but I believe that if you passed, if the states passed laws that said if you are convicted of two crimes and you have drugs in your bloodstream while you did those crimes, you have to go to rehab for a year or 15 months. That would take a lot of the demand away. Forced drug rehab. Because now there are rehab centers, obviously, but you have to be motivated to go to them and a lot of drug addicts aren't. I'll submit most drug addicts don't want to go. They want to get high. They don't want to kick it. Now on the supply side, I've always said that selling hard drugs is a violent act. You've got a 100 a day dying from opiates. People are selling it to them, and they're not responsible partially for that death? Yes, they are. Barack Obama totally destroyed that mindset by saying low level drug deal... there aren't any low-level heroin sales. You sell heroin to somebody, they could die. That's not low level. So President Obama, he didn't want any drug involved people going to prison, he thought is a waste of time. I disagree. So I think if you took the demand away to some extent and you put very harsh punishment, very harsh, on people who sell hard drugs that you might make some inroads. Otherwise, we live in a world of immediate gratification. It's a tough world, tough life. Getting high takes you away from all that. And I don't know if it's going to get any better.
 * Editorial - October 30, 2017:**

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