“According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the death toll from illegal drugs during the year ending in April 2024 was 10 percent lower than the number during the previous year. This would be the largest such drop ever recorded—a striking contrast to the general trend during the previous two decades, when the number of drug deaths rose nearly every year.”
…
“Does this apparent turnaround show the war on drugs is finally succeeding? Dasgupta et al. deemed it “unlikely” that antidrug operations along the U.S.-Mexico border had helped reduce overdoses. They noted that recent border seizures had mainly involved marijuana and methamphetamine rather than illicit fentanyl, the primary culprit in overdoses, and that retail drug prices have been falling in recent years—the opposite of what you would expect if interdiction were effective.
While replacing street drugs with methadone or buprenorphine reduces overdose risk, the researchers said, it did not look like expanded access to such “medication-assisted treatment” could account for the recent drop in deaths. But they thought it was “plausible” that broader distribution of the opioid antagonist naloxone (commonly known as the brand Narcan), which quickly reverses fentanyl and heroin overdoses, had played a role.
In contrast with naloxone programs, which help reduce drug-related harm, prohibition magnifies it by birthing a black market in which quality and purity are highly variable and unpredictable. Efforts to enforce prohibition increase those hazards. The crackdown on pain pills, for example, pushed nonmedical users toward black market substitutes, replacing legally produced, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy street drugs, which became even iffier thanks to the prohibition-driven proliferation of illicit fentanyl.
That crackdown succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, which fell by more than half from 2010 to 2022. Meanwhile, the opioid-related death rate more than tripled, while the annual number of opioid-related deaths nearly quadrupled.
Drug warriors, in short, should not get credit for reducing overdoses. But they do deserve a large share of the blame for creating a situation in which an annual toll of more than 100,000 deaths looks like an improvement.”
“In 2022, for the first time, more Americans were using marijuana daily, or near daily, than consuming alcohol at the same rate, according to a study by Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. The number of daily or near daily marijuana users has grown from less than 1 million in 1992 to 17.7 million in 2022; in terms of per capita rate, that’s a 15-fold increase.”
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“Marijuana isn’t benign for everyone, though. Some of the results of the real-time experiment are already becoming apparent, both to regular users and people working in health care.
“It is very desirable to believe that there is a drug that can make you feel good, that can relax you, and has absolutely no negative outcomes,” says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health. “But in biology, there are no free lunches.”
Take the emergence of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, a condition marked by intense and prolonged bouts of nausea and vomiting and brought on by regular, long-term marijuana use. While once extremely rare, some doctors are saying they now see patients with symptoms frequently. “It emerged because people were consuming marijuana regularly with high [THC] content,” Volkow says. “And similarly, there is now evidence that consumption in those patterns is associated with higher risk of stroke or cardiovascular disease.”
Maybe the most worrying studies about frequent, heavy marijuana use involve teens and young adults. (While experts say marijuana use appears to be less risky for middle-aged adults, there’s still a lot they don’t know that needs to be researched further. Some note that more research is needed on older adults in particular.) Studies show regular marijuana use among adolescents and teens can predict increased risk of the development of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. Others have shown an increased likelihood of depression and suicidal ideation, disrupted dopamine function, and disruptions in the anatomy of the brain.
And marijuana, contrary to popular belief, can be habit forming. It can also increase the risk of dependence on other substances. A recent analysis by Columbia University for the New York Times estimated that as many as 18 million people in the US may have some form of cannabis use disorder, or addiction.
Getting a handle on who might be harming their health is tricky. Even the findings that point to a major rise in daily users leave a lot of questions unanswered, especially around how often they’re smoking, vaping, or ingesting, and how potent the THC is.”
“”The DEA’s attempt to classify DOI, a compound of great significance to both psychedelic and fundamental serotonin research, as a Schedule I substance exemplifies an administrative agency overstepping its bounds,” Rush says. “The government admits DOI is not being diverted for use outside of scientific research yet insists on placing this substance in such a restricted class that it will disrupt virtually all current research.”
SSDP describes the two compounds as “essential research chemicals in pre-clinical psychiatry and neurobiology,” noting that their unscheduled status has made them accessible as tools for studying serotonin receptors. It says DOI, in particular, has been “a cornerstone in neuroscience research” due to its selectivity for the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, crucial for understanding the therapeutic effects of psychedelics. Scientists have used DOI to “map the localization of an important serotonin receptor in the brain critical in learning, memory, and psychiatric disease,” SSDP notes, and DOI studies “have shown encouraging results in managing pain and reducing opioid cravings.””
“On Sunday, just hours after the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, or HTS, captured Damascus and took power, its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani stood up in front of a crowd of supporters inside the capital’s historic Umayyad Mosque and declared: “Syria has become the biggest producer of Captagon on Earth, and today, Syria is going to be purified by the grace of God.”
The future remains uncertain when it comes to the powerful forces of a cartel economy driven by billions of dollars, high demand and a fragile transitional government.”
“although lower retail prices are the opposite of what drug warriors are trying to achieve, they mean that people are less likely to oscillate between using drugs when they can afford them and abstaining when they come up short. That pattern increases the risk of an overdose because tolerance declines during periods of abstinence, whether they result from arrest and jail, disruption of the local drug supply, or financial factors like high prices.
That is just one way in which the war on drugs increases the hazards it aims to mitigate. Prohibition makes drug use much more dangerous by creating a black market in which quality and purity are highly variable and unpredictable. Efforts to enforce prohibition magnify those hazards by encouraging injection instead of safer consumption methods, creating incentives for adulteration, and driving traffickers toward more potent drugs, such as fentanyl, that are easier to conceal and smuggle.
The crackdown on pain pills made all of this worse by replacing legally produced, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy street drugs, which became even iffier thanks to the prohibition-driven proliferation of illicit fentanyl. That crackdown succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, which fell by more than half from 2010 to 2022. Meanwhile, the opioid-related death rate more than tripled, while the annual number of opioid-related deaths nearly quadrupled.
Whatever the reasons, the upward trend in drug-related deaths finally seems to be reversing. As Dasgupta et al. suggest, drug warriors should not get credit for that turnaround, since nothing they have done recently can plausibly explain it. But they do deserve a large share of the blame for creating a situation in which an annual toll of more than 100,000 drug deaths looks like an improvement.”
“The annual U.S. death toll from illegal drugs, which has risen nearly every year since the turn of the century, is expected to fall substantially this year. The timing of that turnaround poses a problem for politicians who aim to prevent substance abuse by disrupting the drug supply.
Those politicians include Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who promises to deploy the military against drug traffickers, and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, whose platform is also heavy on supply-side tactics. Neither candidate seems to have absorbed the lessons of the “opioid epidemic,” which showed that drug law enforcement is not just ineffective but counterproductive, magnifying the harms it is supposed to alleviate.”
…
“While replacing street drugs with methadone or buprenorphine reduces overdose risk, Dasgupta et al. say, it does not look like expanded access to such “medication-assisted treatment” can account for the recent drop in deaths. But they think it is “plausible” that broader distribution of the opioid antagonist naloxone, which quickly reverses fentanyl and heroin overdoses, has played a role.
By contrast, Dasgupta et al. say it is “unlikely” that anti-drug operations along the U.S.-Mexico border have helped reduce overdoses. They note that recent border seizures have mainly involved marijuana and methamphetamine rather than fentanyl, the primary culprit in overdoses, and that retail drug prices have been falling in recent years—the opposite of what you would expect if interdiction were effective.
Supply-side measures, which are doomed by the economics of prohibition, not only have failed to reduce drug-related deaths. They have had the opposite effect.
Prohibition makes drug use much more dangerous by creating a black market in which quality and purity are highly variable and unpredictable, and efforts to enforce prohibition increase those hazards. The crackdown on pain pills, for example, drove nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes, replacing legally produced, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy street drugs, which became even iffier thanks to the prohibition-driven proliferation of illicit fentanyl.
That crackdown succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, which fell by more than half from 2010 to 2022. Meanwhile, the opioid-related death rate more than tripled, while the annual number of opioid-related deaths nearly quadrupled.
Trump and Harris seem unfazed by that debacle. Trump imagines “a full naval embargo on the drug cartels,” while Harris aspires to “disrupt the flow of illicit drugs.” They promise to achieve the impossible while glossing over the costs of persisting in a strategy that has failed for more than a century.”
“the vast majority of fentanyl brought into the U.S. is not carried by illegal immigrants or the result of porous borders: From 2019 to 2024, 80.2 percent of the people arrested at the border with fentanyl were U.S. citizens, according to David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.
And as NPR reported last year, “the vast majority of illicit fentanyl—close to 90%—is seized at official border crossings.””