Every day it feels like we take a step back, lose ground from where we need to go. Saw this today on CNN:
The White House announced Monday a new, $2.5 million initiative designed to target heroin trafficking along the Eastern seaboard, where use of the drug has spiked in recent years.
The plan targets 15 states from New England to Washington for new partnerships between public health and law enforcement agencies, with the goal of prioritizing treatment of addiction over punishment for users.
In each state, a public health official will be paired with a law enforcement specialist to coordinate new heroin response teams, who will share information after overdose incidents and drug raids.
http://www.cnn.com/...
There are many troubling aspects of this new "plan", this new tangent of the failed War on Drugs.
Despite all the efforts of the DEA and police, heroin use is up because it's dirt cheap. Drug dealers don't card, and bored white teenagers find they can get heroin cheaper and easier than they can score beer. If the DEA could restrict access to heroin, they would have by now.
This is yet more massive white privilege. Yes the plan says it's going to prioritize treatment over punishment. For the users. For the spoiled rich white kids in the suburbs. But the inner city black guy who sold the heroin? For him, just a deepening of the police state.
The links between the health officials and law enforcement should trouble everyone. White kid gets brought into the ER for overdose, hospital brings in the heroin response team, and heavy handed tactics begin.
"Want rehab instead of prison kid? Then who's your dealer? Rat him out so we can shoot him up and seize his assets."
Yes, which house do we SWAT raid, throw flash bangs into and shoot up? Especially if surveillance sees the people in the house are black.
And then maybe the next time a kid ODs, he doesn't get dropped off at the hospital, so he can't talk and ruin the party for everyone else?
So again we move further away from the path to full legalization we need to be on. Further away from having heroin not be easily available to kids on the street, further away from the fascist police state. Further away from a path that would actually address the issues of drug use without the police killing people. Millions more will be stolen from tax payers to send dumb white kids to rehab and poor black kids to jail, but little else will change.
Just another day in the failed war on drugs, and hate to say it, but yet another disappointment from the Obama administration.