Stopping drug overdoses is far from a politically safe goal though, because you need to stop the war on drugs and take a less draconian approach, which goes directly against the hard-line stance of the Republican party.
Eh, I think you might be injecting too much partisanship into my original point.
Stopping drug overdoses is popular across the board, but some of the tactics to accomplish that are not. We aren’t even at step zero, pretending to give a shit at the national level.
You also need to factor in the victims, or rather their demographics. To be brutally honest, past victims of heroin were often minorities who lived in inner cities. Blacks in urban ghettos and gays cut off from all social support in particular, plus homeless people of all stripes. It was easy for people to pretend that those victims were simply immoral fools who got their just desserts.
Now the victims are increasingly the children of white, suburban, middle class families. This has brought the crisis much closer to the heart of American political power, and made it much easier for the average voter to know someone who is addicted to or died from opiates.
In theory this should reduce the drive for draconian drug war tactics, since the victims are neighbors and not brown boogeymen over in the big bad city. This doesn’t seem to be happening at the political level, which is weird and disconcerting.
> Stopping drug overdoses is popular across the board, but some of the tactics to accomplish that are not. We aren’t even at step zero, pretending to give a shit at the national level.
We are at step zero, which is we have the capability of measuring the problem.
Lets be frank: there is plenty of people who care, and those people are providing those measurements (CDC analyzing death certificates, especially for Opioid deaths). Whether or not our leaders respond is simply a matter of democracy. We need to elect leaders who care and will do something about it.
But for now, step 0 is done. The public is becoming aware of the problem, and as far as I can tell, everyone is on the same page with regards to facts. Not even Trump dares to call these statistics "Fake News".
Over the next 10 years, I bet this problem will be solved. There really aren't any political headwinds that I foresee. There aren't any political opponents on this issue.
There are huge political headwinds, namely, that the party in charge of all three branches of government considers drug addiction to be a moral failing, not a disease. They are not willing to decriminalize drugs and pay for treatment programs -- they would rather continue the draconian approach of locking up anyone found to be in possession. Look at how much they are already railing against marijuana legalization, safe injection sites, lenient sentencing for non-violent drug offenders, and other similar measures.
I don't know how you can be so rosy about the problem being solved within a decade when the war on drugs has been going on for many decades already.
