There’s a fine art to refusing to learn lessons that are right in front of your eyes. A recent newspaper column demonstrated mastery of that art, managing to simultaneously acknowledge the failures of America’s drug policy while calling for more of the same. The author acknowledged that mandatory minimums do no good and then suggested that the right course of action is to prosecute drug dealers harder. But harder drug law enforcement gets you harder drug problems.
“News coverage of a Mesa police officer losing consciousness in his patrol car from an overdose certainly highlights, if sensationally, the crisis that is opioids, in particular fentanyl,” wrote Abe Kwok, editorial page planner for the Arizona Republic. “As critics such as the libertarian think tank Cato Institute note, harsh mandatory sentencing laws do nothing to blunt narcotic drugs’ effects.”
He added that “the institute pointed to a 1,500% spike in methamphetamine deaths in the United States between 2006 and 2021, following voter-approved Proposition 301 in Arizona that imposed mandatory minimum prison sentences for possessing, transferring, selling, distributing or manufacturing meth.”
Kwok also acknowledged that other restrictive policies, especially limitations on opioid prescriptions “did little to slow deaths from overdoses but created their own set of problems, such as blocking access to relief for chronic pain sufferers.” This is an important point championed by the late Siobhan Reynolds and the Pain Relief Network over a decade ago and still a matter of serious concern for many Americans. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally acknowledged that opioid guidelines are being interpreted inflexibly. The CDC emphasized that “some policies purportedly drawn from the 2016 CDC Opioid Prescribing Guideline have been notably inconsistent with it and have gone well beyond its clinical recommendations” resulting in “untreated and undertreated pain.”
So far, so good for Kwok. Except, he refuses to take these arguments to their logical conclusion.
Hellbound and Down 