If drug prohibition works, why is 'the heroin threat' worse than ever?

Written By Emily Gray Brosious 
 

Mark Comparone watches after releasing balloons into the sky on March 6, 2016 in Plantsville, Connecticut to commemorate the first anniversary of the fatal heroin overdose of his son Benjamin Comparone, 27. (Photo credit: John Moore/Getty Images)

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The U.S. has been fighting a War on Drugs for decades now. So why is heroin more potent and more widely available than ever?

Drugs are illegal because drugs are dangerous. Prohibiting dangerous drugs decreases their overall use, which promotes better public health and safety outcomes. That’s the general argument in favor of criminalizing certain controlled substances.

There’s just one problem. That argument doesn’t hold up to facts.

The trajectory of heroin abuse in the U.S. serves as a particularly telling example of why the War on Drugs doesn’t work.

“The threat posed by heroin in the United States is serious and has increased since 2007,” reads the first line of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration’s June 2016 National Heroin Threat Assessment Summary.

According to the DEA’s report, drug poisoning deaths involving heroin increased 248 percent between 2010 and 2014 in the U.S., with an estimated 10,574 Americans dying from heroin-related overdoses in 2014.

Per the DEA’s report:

“Heroin is available in larger quantities, used by a larger number of people, and is causing an increasing number of overdose deaths.”

The DEA says that the growing demand for heroin is being driven both by the drug’s increasing availability in the U.S. and by controlled prescription drug users turning to heroin, which is typically less expensive than prescription opiate painkillers.

The DEA attributes sharply rising heroin-related overdose death rates to a few driving reasons:

An overall increase in heroin users; high purity batches of heroin sold in certain markets, causing users to accidentally overdose; an increase in new heroin initiates, many of whom are young and inexperienced; abusers of prescription opioids (drugs with known compositions and concentrations) initiating use of heroin, an illicitly-manufactured drug with varying purities, dosage amounts, and adulterants; and the use of highly toxic heroin adulterants such as fentanyl in certain markets.

DEA heroin arrests nearly doubled between 2007 and 2014, according to the agency’s report. These surging arrest numbers did not correlate to reductions in heroin use or heroin-related overdose death rates. In fact, the opposite is true.

What can be gathered from the DEA’s heroin threat assessment? For starters, prohibition doesn’t work. Many experts agree that as long as there is demand for drugs like heroin, there will be supply and there will be users.

This recognition has propelled a growing movement urging drug policy reforms that promote harm reduction as opposed to prohibition and criminalization.

What is harm reduction?

Harm Reduction Coalition (HRC) describes harm reduction as “a set of practical strategies and ideas aimed at reducing negative consequences associated with drug use.”

HRC considers these principles central to harm reduction:

• Accepts, for better and or worse, that licit and illicit drug use is part of our world and chooses to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn them.
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• Understands drug use as a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that encompasses a continuum of behaviors from severe abuse to total abstinence, and acknowledges that some ways of using drugs are clearly safer than others.

More from the Global Commission on Drugs:

Throughout history and in virtually all cultures, many people have used a wide variety of psychoactive drugs, often despite the most determined efforts to prevent the initiation or continued consumption of drugs.

The major definitions of alcohol and drug dependence, the ICD and DSM, identify ‘continued use despite severe adverse consequences’ as one of the most important characteristics of these conditions.

Nevertheless, the approach to illicit drug use in virtually all countries in recent decades relied on increasing the severity of the adverse consequences of illicit drug use in the hope that this would result in cessation of drug consumption.

Consequently, drug users often developed severe health problems, lived in squalor and debt, spent years in prison and often had their children taken away. Rarely did these severe adverse consequences have any effect on drug consumption by drug users.

The response of authorities was usually to make the severe adverse consequences even more severe by increasing the chance of detection by police and prolonging the prison sentences handed out by courts. Increasing the harm to drug users does not significantly reduce drug use.

Attractive and effective drug treatment helps people with drug problems. But in virtually all countries most people with severe drug problems are unable obtain such treatment.