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Let's reinvigorate the wonderfully successful war on drugs,
If prison worked, or if enforcement eliminated drug supplies, the U.S. would have seen a decrease in drug use and overdose deaths in the decades since the war on drugs began. Instead, data show that we suffer from 10 times the number of overdose deaths compared to 1990, despite billions spent on prohibition. The use and availability of fentanyl and other opiates has increased, not decreased.
Every overdose death is a tragedy, and too many Americans have been impacted by overdoses and a lack of health care for users. But let’s not be fooled. It’s easy for politicians to jump to “lock ‘em up” policies as a supposed “quick fix” to try to appease voters. We know from more than four decades of the failed war on drugs that this quick fix is a fiction. Prison and enforcement has not and will never make us safe from the risks of substance use. We need our leaders to tell the truth about this fact. We owe it to those who have lost their lives to overdose, and to those lives that can still be saved.
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