Thank you for bringing our attention to Andrew Sullivan's informative and insightful essay, A must read for all who are members here.

Two paragraphs:

"One of the few proven ways to reduce overdose deaths is to establish supervised injection sites that eventually wean users off the hard stuff while steering them into counseling, safe housing, and job training. After the first injection site in North America opened in Vancouver, deaths from heroin overdoses plunged by 35 percent. In Switzerland, where such sites operate nationwide, overdose deaths have been cut in half. By treating the addicted as human beings with dignity rather than as losers and criminals who have ostracized themselves, these programs have coaxed many away from the cliff face of extinction toward a more productive life.

"But for such success to be replicated in the United States, we would have to contemplate actually providing heroin to addicts in some cases, and we’d have to shift much of the current spending on prohibition, criminalization, and incarceration into a huge program of opioid rehabilitation. We would, in short, have to end the war on drugs. We are nowhere near prepared to do that. And in the meantime, the comparison to act up is exceedingly depressing, as the only politics that opioids appear to generate is nihilistic and self-defeating. The drug itself saps initiative and generates social withdrawal. A few small activist groups have sprung up, but it is hardly a national movement of any heft or urgency."

I lost my oldest son, hooked on opioids after years of pain relief, having survived being bitten by a mother and two baby rattlesnakes and lying for a week before friends found him in the desert of New Mexico.

There were no shortages of doctors he could go to and get repeat and identical prescriptions. His rattlesnake damaged kidneys, exacerbated by opioids, eventually gave out.

Three months after he died, I lost my oldest grandson to a single shot of heroin. Rehabbed for a year, he returned from having been out for three weeks on his job as a foreman on an otherwise all white firefighting crew+ and stopped by Jason's for a shower. Jason couldn't get the bathroom door open against his body.

A black young man, raised by white parents--my daughter's husband adopted him--his father she met in high school when we lived in Florida--he never learned to be tolerant of racist jabs that a black home would have taught him. In the absence of that stoic tolerance, heroin apparently softened the cruelty of the racism he suffered all his life: from "get this pickaninny(sic) out of my yard", to being followed by store clerks when he shopped, to being chased by whites down an alley in Vegas. He got tired of running and cold-cocked the one nearest him. The chase ended.

The world lost two brilliant men, an astrophysicist and a poet- songwriter; both would have made their marks.