Opioids, cannabis and criminal justice reform helped undermine this decade’s War on Drugs

With an extraordinary number of Americans suffering, the door has opened to understanding and treating the pain of drug use rather than apply brute force.

Illustration of graves with drug paraphernalia engraved on them.

While the opioid crisis didn’t begin in this decade, it did accelerate to unprecedented heights, with record-breaking death rates leading to a drop in life expectancy.

This much we know: Americans like to do drugs. That might explain why a prescient headline in the satirical publication The Onion stands as one of the most enduring comments on American drug enforcement — “Drugs Win Drug War.”

There are ongoing arrests for cannabis and deep racial disparities among those detained, but the change in the trend line is profound.

While that article was published in 1998, it was only during the past decade that its parody devolved into grim reality. In many ways, this reality has been an aching nadir, with more lives lost annually to overdoses than AIDS, gun violence and car crashes. But this past decade also brought its highs (pun intended): Recreational marijuana prohibitions started to fall in a domestic domino effect as one state after another accepted that it was pointless to criminalize the use of such a widely consumed drug. And at root, it is this shifting attitude on the role of the criminal justice system in prosecuting drug use that signifies the most fundamental change in our love-hate relationship with controlled substances.

Though far from over, the War on Drugs has felt more like a tug of war across this past decade rather than a righteous crusade, with reformers trying to fend off the country’s prohibitionist impulse as it makes a last-gasp effort to ramp up arrests and enhance penalties. And the reformers have public opinion on their side — the decade comes to an end with a majority of Americans favoring a more compassionate approach than locking users up. The criminalization of drug use is both out of step with what people want and what the evidence shows to work; in fits and starts, policy, policing and the law are finally starting to catch up.

Originally published on Dec. 29, 2019, By Zachary Siegel
at https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/opioids-pot-criminal-justice-reform-helped-undermine-decade-s-war-ncna1108231

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