“There are many reasons a person could find themselves homeless, but severe mental illness is a major contributor. Last month, Esquire ran a first-person account of Patrick Fealey, an award-winning journalist who found himself unable to hold a job after he was diagnosed with Bipolar I disorder in 1997; after struggling for years, he became homeless in October 2023. While admitting that his particular cocktail of drugs is not ideal and negatively affects other parts of his body, Fealey writes that it also “enables me to function and has kept me alive for twenty-seven years.”
A 2019 meta analysis of 31 studies, encompassing nearly 52,000 homeless people in both developed and developing countries, found that more than 10 percent had schizophrenia or related disorders.
“While ensuring drug safety is essential,” Singer and Bloom write, “the REMS program has unintentionally created barriers that disproportionately affect individuals with severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia, further compounding the significant challenges they already face, including unemployment, substance abuse, heightened suicide risk and homelessness.””
“If stopping the flow of illegal drugs is as straightforward as Trump implies, one might wonder, why didn’t he do that during his first term? “I’m going to create borders,” he promised during his 2016 campaign. “No drugs are coming in. We’re gonna build a wall. You know what I’m talking about. You have confidence in me. Believe me, I will solve the problem.”
Trump did not, in fact, solve the problem. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the annual number of drug-related deaths in the United States rose by 44 percent between 2016 and Trump’s last year in office.
As drug warriors have been discovering since Congress banned nonmedical use of opiates and cocaine in 1914, prohibition creates a strong financial incentive to evade any obstacles that the government manages to erect between suppliers and consumers. That problem is compounded in the case of fentanyl, which is cheap to produce and highly potent, making it possible to smuggle large numbers of doses in small packages.”
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“Mexican drug cartels “move illicit fentanyl into the United States, primarily across the southwestern border, often in passenger vehicles,” the CRS reports. “The U.S.
Department of Homeland Security asserts that 90% of [seized] fentanyl is interdicted at ports of entry, often in vehicles driven by U.S. citizens. A primary challenge for both
Mexican and U.S. officials charged with stopping the fentanyl flow is that [the cartels] can meet U.S. demand with a relatively small amount.”
Finding those small amounts among the hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks that cross into the United States from Canada and Mexico each day is a daunting task.”
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” Even if the U.S. “managed to stop 100 percent of direct [fentanyl] sales to the US, enterprising dealers [would] simply sell into nations such as the UK, repackage the product, and then resell it into the US,” economist Roger Bate noted in a 2018 American Enterprise Institute report. “Intercepting all packages from the UK and other EU nations to the US will not be possible.” And “whether or not drugs are available to the general public via the mail,” Bate added, “drug dealers have domestic production and overland and sea routes and other courier services that deliver the product to the US.””
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“after Trump had four years to deliver on his promise that “no drugs” would be “coming in” during his administration. Yet he now claims that Mexican and Canadian officials could accomplish what he manifestly failed to do if only they tried harder.”
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“Even if severe legal penalties were enough to deter all Chinese suppliers of fentanyl precursors, that would not be the end of the story. As The New York Times recently noted, Mexican cartels already have a backup plan: They are recruiting “chemistry students studying at Mexican universities” so they can “synthesize the chemical compounds, known as precursors, that are essential to making fentanyl, freeing them from having to import those raw materials from China.””
https://reason.com/2024/12/11/trumps-plan-to-fight-illegal-drugs-with-punitive-tariffs-makes-no-sense/
“According to a new investigation from The Marshall Project, hospitals are giving women drugs during labor and then reporting them to child welfare services when they later test positive for those same drugs. These cases are one of the more maddening side effects of an out-of-control drug war combined with strict mandatory reporting laws.”
“Since June 27, 2022 (three days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade), Mississippi has prohibited nearly all abortions. According to the 2007 bill that resulted in that ban, “every human being, including those in utero, possesses a natural intrinsic right to live.” It is therefore hard to understand why Brandy Moore, a mother of four who lives in Leake County, Mississippi, was recently arrested for a felony because she decided not to have an abortion back in 2019, when the procedure was still legal in her state.
The explanation for that puzzling situation lies at the confluence between the war on drugs and a child protection system that often breaks up families without solid evidence of neglect or abuse. In this case, that dangerous combination was compounded by a local prosecutor, District Attorney Steven Kilgore, who for years deployed patently frivolous criminal charges in an attempt to get drug-using mothers the help he thought they needed, whether they wanted it or not.
Moore’s legal ordeal, which stemmed from surreptitious drug tests at the hospital where she gave birth to her daughter Remi in 2019, is detailed in a Mississippi Today story, produced in collaboration with The Marshall Project, that shows her situation is far from unique. Across Mississippi and across the country, postnatal drug tests can trigger grueling investigations by state-appointed social workers, separation of mothers from their newborn children, and even criminal charges. These interventions are all based on the faulty presumption that women who use illegal drugs during pregnancy—or are mistakenly suspected of doing so based on erroneous test results—are manifestly unfit parents.
Moore’s experience is nevertheless striking in several ways. She stopped using methamphetamine around the middle of her pregnancy after a religious epiphany inspired her to reject abortion and turn her life around. For reasons that remain unclear, she was secretly indicted in 2020 but was not arrested until last May, at which point Remi was 4. And most remarkable of all, Kilgore, who seems to have previously overlooked the human consequences of treating mothers as criminals based on hospital drug tests, had an awakening of his own as a result of Mississippi Today’s investigation.
“I’ve reevaluated our stance on the topic and have decided not to handle these cases anymore,” Kilgore told Mississippi Today reporter Anna Wolfe after learning how his decisions had harmed Moore and other women, several of whom received stiff prison sentences because they failed to fully comply with the 8th Judicial District’s drug court program. “It was eye-opening to learn of the fate of these women. I believe we can all do better.”
As Kilgore tells it, he never thought these women belonged in prison. He just wanted to scare them straight. Toward that end, he charged them with “aggravated domestic violence,” a felony punishable by up to 20 years behind bars.
Under Mississippi law, “a person is guilty of aggravated domestic violence” when he “attempts to cause serious bodily injury to another, or causes such an injury purposely, knowingly or recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.” Contrary to the way Kilgore read that statute, simply using an illegal drug during pregnancy does not meet the elements of that offense.
Moore, for example, says she used meth early in her pregnancy to help her deal with stress at a difficult time. “The father wanted no involvement and encouraged her to get an abortion,” Wolfe writes. “As Moore plotted where and when to get the procedure, which was still legal in Mississippi at the time, she was using crystal meth to cope.” Once she decided to keep the baby, “it wasn’t hard to stop getting high.””
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“Mississippi Today and The Marshall Project “found 44 women across Mississippi who were arrested between 2015 and 2023 for felony child abuse or child endangerment after their newborns tested positive for drugs.” Such cases lead to family separation, intrusive surveillance, and criminal punishment—outcomes that reflect the arbitrary distinctions drawn by U.S. drug laws. Although alcohol consumption during pregnancy can harm a fetus, caseworkers and prosecutors do not target new mothers simply because they are drinkers. Yet any detectable use of an illegal drug is enough to trigger life-disrupting and liberty-threatening interventions.
Beyond the individual injustices, these policies may deter drug-using women from seeking medical care, which surely is not in the interest of the children whom officials claim to be protecting or the mothers they claim to be helping. The threat of criminal penalties might even tip the scale in favor of abortion, the option that Moore rejected years before she discovered that decision could send her to prison.
Gilliam thinks the demise of Roe v. Wade has encouraged prosecutors to pursue such cases. “Some local prosecutors across the nation have been charging women in these scenarios for years,” Wolfe notes. “But no year saw more of these criminal charges than the year following the U.S. Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe.”
After Kilgore saw the error of his ways, he dropped the case against Moore, who has mixed feelings about that result. “When she learned of the dismissal, Moore broke down in tears of relief,” Wolfe writes. “But she said she was also almost sad about the conclusion—that she would have no public trial to challenge how the [district attorney] is criminalizing pregnant women in her community. Maybe a trial would have helped others, possibly changed some laws, she thought. That’s what she hopes telling her story might do, especially for the mothers currently incarcerated.””
“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.”
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“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.”
“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.”
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“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.”
“Those laws create a black market in which the composition and potency of drugs is uncertain and highly variable. They also push traffickers toward highly potent drugs such as fentanyl, which are easier to conceal and smuggle. As a result, drug users like Gentili typically don’t know exactly what they are consuming, which magnifies the risk of a fatal mistake. The “poisoning” that Peace and Caban decried therefore is a consequence of the policies they were proudly enforcing in this very case.”
“Joe Biden “was a key figure in passing the 1994 Crime Bill, which disproportionately harmed Black communities through harsh sentencing laws and increased incarceration rates,” Donald Trump’s campaign reminded voters last week. If elected, Trump promised in a speech at the Libertarian National Convention two days later, he will free Ross Ulbricht, who is serving a life sentence for running Silk Road, an online marketplace used by illegal drug vendors.
Trump’s criticism of disproportionate drug penalties contradicts his own platform, which threatens defendants like Ulbricht with death. The former and possibly future president wants to have it both ways, slamming Biden for his long history as a zealous drug warrior while portraying himself as even tougher.”