There is an ongoing effort to paint a picture more water color or charcoal sketched than an enduring oil painting.
Repeatedly we hear accusations about people dying because they opted for a risky choice. The choice is to enjoy recreation in the form of injecting heroin. The reason, if you believe the press releases from Concord, is the lack of addiction counseling.
People would not die, according to government press releases, if we spent millions of dollars to provide, through Medicaid, free drug rehabilitation and counseling.
This is a preposterous posit and denies the free choice exercised by the addict, who hears the same horror stories we all hear and often knows someone who ended their own life by taking fentanyl-laced heroin, a known poison with a high probability of death.
I have never heard of anyone deciding to take heroin because the state did not provide free drug counseling. Many users, after ruining their lives and the lives of their families, friends and acquaintances, seek counseling. Many drug abusers find a cure through self-help and 12-step programs available without cost.
We fool ourselves and dwell on feelings of guilt over tragedies affecting many persons and families in all of our communities. Like good Americans, we seek a quick fix, no matter the expense to the taxpayer. We do not think about the states that have had a decrease in opiate deaths when users switch to much less lethal cannabis.
As a matter of fact, there are no cases of death by overdose of cannabis. Legally obtained alcohol causes many deaths every year, cannabis does not. Should the government allow the use of heroin, we could have a safe dosage program through pharmacists and eliminate deaths like they do in Great Britain.
We are promised by politicians lives can be saved by appropriating millions of dollars to finance the rehab services. There are not enough trained counselors now to divide up this gift from the taxpayers, much less beds for in-patient rehabilitation.
It is tragic to be addicted to anything. Opiate use often causes death, destroys families and businesses, and sets a model for behavior when witnessed by the young.
Opiates destroy the attention needed to get out of bed and go to a job, pay attention on the job and support yourself if not also a family. Alcohol and other addictions also cause death but do not usually drag the entire family into the grave with the user.
Once again, the power of force by the government will extract from the economy money rightfully belonging to the taxpayer, the person who earned it in the first place. This forced taxation will reduce to a degree the security of the earner/owner while promising more benefit will be delivered than lost by the earners of the tax dollars.
The government, who we allowed to destroy education, will now gift upon providers the millions of dollars taken from sober families to give hope to the families of the addicted.
Some of the providers will be successful, some will not. Some families will be better off, but the taxpayer families will always be assured of less net pay to take home to their families.
Rest assured, there is no measure of success like many other government programs. There will be no goals where we can say this program was a success or a failure. The War on Drugs will go on because we design government programs to go on, not to be successful.
Taxpayers are being billed to pay the costs of promises made by politicians to garner votes. Normally careful and conservative representatives and senators are stampeded into supporting programs because if they do not, they will be attacked at election time as not being responsive to the “needy.”
Addiction is a mental and physical health problem, but it does not rise to the label of a public health epidemic. Addiction exists everywhere in the world. Other nations treat addicts with every extreme of punishment down to ignoring the problem. We propose to devote enormous amounts of production from our economy to relieve us of guilty feelings from the result of abysmal judgment by certain citizens.
Harming everyone a little bit does not justify the hopeful waste of resources to resolve a problem forefront in the minds of opinion makers.
The diversion of money better spent to relieve the lives of the disabled, mentally distressed or physically disadvantaged to addiction cures is poor allocation of resources.
The Senate has sent a bill to the House creating a commission to study shortages of nurses and other allied health professionals. Don’t imagine the rehab service industry is any better staffed.
The futile pursuit of curing ill-conceived behavior shifts priorities from the measurably successful care of those in need, through no fault of their own, to those who have chosen to harm themselves.
We in the Legislature need to do a better job at setting the priorities for spending taxpayer dollars.
(State Sen. John Reagan is a Deerfield Republican.)