Anesthetizing ourselves to death – Washington Times

OPINION:

It came and went without any headlines, and they should have been everywhere. In a better time, or perhaps with a different administration, this would have been a massive story. It is a huge story, hugely consequential, hugely devastating.

For decades, every professional in the world of drug and substance abuse prevention, treatment and recovery knew that 1979 was our single worst year of regular drug use in America, with 14.1% of our population using drugs. 1979 was the high-water mark. It prompted this country to roll up its sleeves and get to work.

Then-Sen. Joe Biden helped conceptualize a National Office of Drug Control Policy, and a decade later, we had that office, led by what has been known ever since as the drug czar. William J. Bennett was our first, and then-President George H.W. Bush made a big deal of that office and his czar, President Ronald Reagan’s former secretary of education. Nancy Reagan led the “Just Say No” initiative over the course of her husband’s presidency, and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America created public service advertisements like “This is your brain on drugs,” which many of us remember. Schools, Hollywood and professional athletics got in the game as well, with anti-drug messaging nearly everywhere.

As with most prevention messaging, it worked. By 1992, we had reduced drug use in this country by 60%. But soon thereafter, we moved on. The Clinton administration downgraded the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and treatment became more of a business, shunning prevention and other early and regular education efforts. Programs changed, dropped and ceased; political leaders moved on to other issues; “sobriety chic” in Hollywood manifested into the glamorization of drug use; and, of course, campaigns for legality with an attendant normalization and advertising campaign for prescription drugs affecting mood disorders became the norm.

Then came the opioid crisis, and then the disintegration of the southern border. A perfectly inhumane storm of carelessness, profit and lawlessness was bringing us back to near-1979 use levels. Illegal and dangerous drug use began creeping up again. And the death toll came as well. When we hit our low-water mark of drug use in 1992, drug poisoning deaths amounted to just over 5,000 a year in this country. Today, they are over 106,000.

So, while our country’s population grew by just under one-third since 1992, drug poisoning deaths increased by over 2,000%. To sense the scale, consider the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington. There are about 58,000 names on that wall, and it took some 16 years to amass those souls that constitute that long, dark wall. At the rate we are now going, we are nearly doubling in death (or the need for two walls) every year what that sad wall represents from over the course of 16 years.

Today, rather than the nation’s hair being on fire over this, nobody can identify the drug czar or knows if we even have one. And the public messaging effort is to normalize dangerous and illegal drug use, as public health campaigns from San Francisco to New York City are doing with signs stating such things as “avoid using alone,” “take turns” and “start small.”

That is not only the opposite of prevention messaging; it is encouragement, encouragement to addiction and encouragement to death. Can anyone imagine Mothers Against Drunk Driving saying, “If you are going to drink and drive, do it with friends,” or “have only one shot” or “eat before you imbibe and drive”? Is this how we decreased cigarette smoking in America? Is this what we say about vaping nicotine?

And so it came and went without any headlines last week, but the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, found that 14.3% of the U.S. population regularly uses illegal and dangerous drugs. We’ve surpassed our 1979 high-water mark and reached a new high … or, some might say, a new low in our achievement on public health and sobriety.

In ignoring this or taking it all as blase, it is beyond any doubt that our country’s culture and set of concerns are disoriented, as we are now massively anesthetizing ourselves to death. This is no longer a problem we can ignore or encourage. It is time, well past time, to put serious attention on this problem, as we did once before — and get back to work to reducing drug use in this country rather than ignoring it, surrendering to it and encouraging it.

Over the last three years, this entire nation focused on our fellow citizens’ lungs. It is time to take their brains and their lives, especially young brains and lives, just as seriously, if not more so. A headline, somewhere, attention, anywhere, on our new high-water mark of drug use in this country should be a first step.

• Seth Leibsohn is a senior fellow with the Claremont Institute and a radio host on KKNT in Phoenix.