Heroin use and prescription drug abuse/misuse has been on the rise in recent years, particularly in the New England states and the South. As a result of this detrimental behavior, the Obama Administration has announced this year's drug policy that will focus on heroin and prescription painkillers.
According to White House statistics, illicit drug use in the United States cost the country $193 billion in productivity, health care, and criminal justice expenses in 2007. Michael Botticelli is the acting director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy and today he outlined the blueprint for the new policy on Wednesday in Roanoke, Virginia.
The Obama Administration hopes to focus more on preventing overdoses from opioids (heroin and painkillers), which mirrors the actions of New England state governors Deval Patrick (Massachusetts), Peter Shumlin (Vermont), and Paul LePage (Maine). First responders at law enforcement agencies in these states were given Naloxone - a drug that counters the effects of opioid overdoses. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were nearly 15,000 overdose deaths due to opioid pain relievers in 2008. There were a total of 36,450 drug overdose deaths that year.
The new drug control plan also aims to provide better access to drug treatment, focus more on drug prevention, provide more alternatives to incarceration, and begin trying to mend the problem at the local level to help solve the issue as a whole. The government also plans to crack down on crime, as data have shown that in a number of U.S. counties crime and substance use are linked. Botticelli also acknowledged that this drug policy doesn't differ from those in the past; they will simply put more focus on opioid and heroin use because of the unprecedented rise.
"The plan we released today calls for reforming our criminal justice system to find alternatives to incarceration - and effective interventions across the entire system to get people the treatment they need," said Botticelli in this Office of National Drug Control Policy news release. "Here's the problem: far too often, for people who need it most, the criminal justice system can seem like the only way to get help for a substance use disorder. That's because until recently, prohibitively high costs and limited access to treatment put it out of reach for millions of people in need."
The policy also aims to oppose the legalization of marijuana for medical and recreational use, but the federal government might have showed up late to the party. 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana for medical use and two states (Colorado and Washington) have already legalized it for recreational use. Nonetheless, the plan is a sure step in the right direction to help combat the ramped illegal drug use that has spread throughout the United States.
You can read more about the 2014 drug control policy in this ABC News article.
