Feeding addiction
Official government policy too often enables addiction, ignores mental illness
More than 100,000 Americans died from an accidental overdose of drugs last year.
This year, the total will almost assuredly rise yet again.
Our children are at far higher risk of dying alone on the street from an OD than they are of being shot - or dying of COVID-19.
Yet our national discussion only rarely takes an honest, full look at the drug epidemic.
While you’ve likley encountered a news story about the opioid crisis of legal prescription drug abuse, it’s far less likely that you’ve seen a news report about the rapid growth in overdoses from illegal street drugs.
If the media is guilty of mostly ignoring one of the most important stories of our time, the government is guilty of much worse: Enabling its citizens’ addictions.
Those who are homeless, or suffering from mental illness (and there is a huge overlap there), are at much higher risk of dying of an overdose.
And yet, federal policy - and that of many states and local jurisdictions - is to promote a “housing first” philosophy to addressing homelessness.
Under this philosophy, the homeless are given not only emergency shelter, but free long-term housing with no prerequisites on their behavior.
Faith-based programs that require the homeless to stay sober in order to qualify for permanent housing are ineligible for federal funding - and depending on the jurisdiction, state or local funding as well.
And with many private foundations following the government’s lead, many of these sobriety programs - which have a proven track record of helping the chronically homeless turn their lives around - are not eligible for grants from the larger foundations, either, and must rely on individual donations to continue offering their truly life-saving services.
As Michael Shellenberger has amply illustrated, “housing first” programs aren’t designed to help the chronically homeless learn the life skills they need to become self-sufficient - they’re designed to provide long-term employment for the folks staffing the “housing first” agencies.
The hypocrisy and unseriousness of our official government approach to the issue of substance abuse manifests in other ways, too.
Flavored nicotine is increasingly under fire, with both flavored e-cigarette refills and menthol cigarettes being banned in more and more jurisdictions. And while tobacco companies have been prohibited for decades from advertising in any medium even tangentially aimed at children - including adult-oriented magazines - marijuana is touted on billboards and online ads in full view of minors. Flavored “edible” cannabis, too, is now all the rage.
While newspaper editorials rage against “big tobacco,” most of those same newspapers came out in favor of legalizing marijuana. (Do they honestly believe that “big pot” is any less interested in maximizing profits than the tobacco firms?)
If smoking tobacco is bad for you, smoking pot is no better. The old argument that people don’t smoke three packs of joints a day, so pot isn’t as harmful to the lungs, is undercut both by the fact that pot smokers will hold in the marijuana smoke as long as possible to increase their high and by the fact that recent studies show that the more powerful strains of marijuana lead to heavier usage.
In fact, while it used to be joked that nobody ever died of a marijuana overdose, even that isn’t true anymore: Severe cases of cannabis-induced psychoses are leading to severe mental breakdowns that can end up in either suicide or accidental death.
The response?
More states are looking at legalizing marijuana - government officials blinded by visions of dancing dollar signs, voters by well-intended libertarian inclinations but often poorly informed about the full range of risks. Oregon has gone a step further, basically decriminalizing all hard drugs - including cocaine and heroin.
About 45,000 people died in the United States from gunshot wounds in 2020 - more than half of those suicides. Those who would outlaw gun ownership make the emotional argument that stripping about a third of their fellow Americans of a cherished right is worth it if it “saves even one life.”
When anti-drug activists pointed out ahead of Colorado’s decision to legalize pot that doing so would inevitably, unavoidably lead to an increase in fatal car crashes, supporters of legal pot shrugged off those additional deaths as “the price of freedom.”
So clearly “saving even one life” is not a universal proposition - not when 2.5 times as many Americans are dying of accidental overdoses as from guns.
When cities are setting up “safe zones” for homeless drug addicts to come take their drugs, it’s a pretty thin form of compassion. When federal and state funds can be used to give homeless addicts free housing with no expectation of, let alone requirement for, sobriety - but not used to fund proven sobriety programs?
That’s simple cruelty, posing as compassion.
Right now, we have official government policy in much of this country that not only does nothing to reduce either homelessness or addiction, but in fact compounds both. It is a form of abuse - one being called out by many of the families of those lost to addiction.
Nobody grows up dreaming of becoming an addict or living on the streets. That situation is the result of broken dreams, or broken minds ravaged by mental illness.
No nation, no society, that tolerates this - that, in many ways enables it - dare call itself civilized.
After dropping out of Cal Poly Pomona - where I was majoring in, of all things, ag engineering - halfway through my first quarter, I moved back to San Diego with my folks and got a job at a fast-food joint downtown by City College. Horton Plaza was not yet a redeveloped shopping mall, and what would become the Gaslamp Quarter was still flophouse hotels and industrial warehouses.
It was a tough neighborhood.
But my manager at the Jack in the Box offered me a 50 cent an hour bonus to work the graveyard shift - 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., and at a time when the minimum wage was $2.90 an hour, that was a big deal.
As I said, it was a tough neighborhood. Getting robbed a few times, and having a coworker attacked by a homeless guy who hopped the counter to help himself to free coffee, led me to apply to San Diego State.
I started back in January of 1981, and at the start of the following fall semester, enrolled in Air Force ROTC. My granddad and mom’s older brother had both served in the Air Force, and I just loved reading about World War II aviation.
I loved the camaraderie, the teamwork. I made honor cadet my freshman year, was accepted into the Arnold Air Society, was one of two Air Force cadets assigned to the all-service color guard at SDSU (alongside two Army cadets, two Navy midshipmen, and two Marine Corps Platoon Leaders Class candidates), and was tabbed for a good leadership slot my sophomore year.
Unless Uncle Sam has offered you a full-ride four-year scholarship, you don’t find out if you’ll be offered an officer’s commission until midway through your sophomore year of ROTC. But I had good grades, was working on an aerospace engineering degree, and was near the top of my class in all the military criteria: PT, leadership, had perfect scores in my ROTC courses. The senior cadet who commanded our cadet flight even appointed me his senior NCO cadet - top of the sophomore class. I picked a missile launch officer slot for my preferred career path - knowing I had zero chance of a flight slot given my bad eyesight.
I just didn’t realize how bad my eyesight was.
I failed the eye exam portion of my military physical.
That, and changing my major after failing to get a B in calculus after two attempts, made me far less valuable to the Air Force - not when interest was high. (A typical freshman class in AFROTC in the early ’80s was about 80; only 25 of them would be commissioned four years’ hence.)
My eyes were (and are) corrected to 20/20, but my vision fell below the Department of Defense threshold of -10 diopter prescription. It turns out, I was high on the risk chart for retina detachment, and Uncle Sam understandably didn’t want to take that risk - or cost.
I applied for a waiver - and was told it would take six months to a year to get reviewed.
So that next fall, my junior year, I enrolled in Army ROTC’s freshman program there on campus - figuring that if I got my waiver, having a little bit of infantry training couldn’t hurt.
Army ROTC was pretty different from Air Force ROTC. For one thing, the Army expected you at field training every other Saturday morning at a reserve base on the south side of then Naval Air Station Miramar. (The base was located on land that is now the intersection of Interstate 15 and state Route 163.)
We’d be there before dawn, in our fatigues. The senior cadets would start us off with a two-mile run - and not in the sneakers, but in combat boots. Then we’d move into a classroom to go over whatever skill we’d work on that day: Field-stripping an M-16 carbine, reconnoitering by map, learning to use terrain to mask small-unit movements, first aid, using a LAW rocket against enemy armor.
For a young guy in great health (outside the spectacles), it was spectacular fun with a great group of people.
And not that I’m competitive or anything, but if they were going to have a contest on who could tear down an M45 standard issue pistol and put it back together the fastest while blindfolded? I wanted to be first.
Whenever I did well, the major who was in charge of these weekend training sessions would about lose his mind. As I recall, he was a helo pilot who hated the Air Force - and having an Air Force washout take the Army class while waiting for a possible Air Force waiver just drove him nuts. He hated the way I called cadence. Hated the way I marched. I don’t think he was particularly fond of the way I breathed.
One Saturday morning, we got to practice throwing dummy grenades. They were the same size and weight as standard-issue frag grenades, but just solid steel with no explosives. I don’t think it even had a real pin.
In the classroom, we learned the three throwing positions: Standing, kneeling and prone, and the proper technique. (Like most civilians, I assumed you tossed a grenade like a baseball - but a grenade is significantly heavier, and you’d ruin your shoulder and elbow pretty quickly trying to throw a grenade that way. Instead, you lob it, your elbow locked in place as you swing from the shoulder and hips.)
We moved from the classroom out to the practice range, where there were targets set up for the three positions. I did pretty well in both standing and kneeling, to where I had one of the top scores. The prone position is used from behind a low bit of cover - a fallen tree, a small trench, etc. Here, they had laid out a small berm of railroad ties - to toss the grenade, you roll toward the obstacle so that only your throwing arm is ever exposed.
You can’t even see the target from the prone position - you have to eyeball it before lying down, and then toss in that direction.
Somehow, the half-blind Air Force reject landed all five grenades in the target area.
I thought the major was going to pop a vein in his neck.
“Are you soldiers going to let a #%@! Air Force puke show you up in throwing grenades?” he screamed at the other cadets who hadn’t finished yet.
I felt bad for them - and was sure they were going to be ticked off at me.
But at the end of the day, when the major had dismissed us and we were walking to the parking lot, the senior Army ROTC cadets came over with big smiles to shake my hand and congratulate me.
While I never did get my waiver from the Air Force, and turned down an offer from one of the Army officers to try to get me an Army commission (he was a reservist on temporary active duty - but a newspaper reporter and editor by trade, and thought I was showing promise writing for the student newspaper on campus), I still remember both the Air Force and Army cadets as some of the finest people I ever got to team up with.
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