ADDICTION TREATMENT WORKS WELL . . . WHEN PATIENTS CAN BE KEPT SHIELDED FROM AVAILABILITY OF ADDICTIVE DRUGS
New Ohio law is further indictment of failed lethal systems that predict no benefit instead harm, as established for decades
by Clark Miller
Published June 13, 2022
So, it seems that American Medicine’s proven treatments that cure opioid use disorder work really well, and really are the “fix” for America’s opioid problem, it’s just that they can’t be supplied to users fast enough to keep up with demand for them. That explains why, as the dispensing and availability of those proven anti-addcition medications have increased steadily over past decades, more and more Americans are dying due to high-risk opioid use.
And, it turns out, they’re not perfect, not perfect enough to prevent or even slow the uncontrolled, increasingly lethal street economies of high-risk opioid use they serve as currency and commodity in. Not perfect, but in fact would work really well whenever patients using them could be prevented from being exposed again over their lives to opioids or other drugs otherwise made available to them.
The observations establishing that important and required aspect in potential success of American Medicine’s dispensing of opioids for opioid use disorder are basis for the wisdom and effective action in Ohio, where opioid users in treatment will be shielded by use of the deterrent effect of the threat of criminal charges against anyone thinking of providing illicit opioids to them while they are being cured of opioid use disorder in a treatment program. By establishing criminal penalties for exchanging those opioids if the exchange is within 500 feet of where the opioid-dependent patient is being cured of opioid use disorder, in the treatment program.
I am not making this up.
A bill that would toughen penalties for those who deal drugs near a site offering substance addiction treatment or to addicts undergoing treatment passed the Ohio legislature on Wednesday.
The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Theresa Gavarone, R-Huron, is similar to current Ohio law where felony levels are increased for drug trafficking near schools or juveniles. In many cases, a fourth-degree felony would become a third-degree one.
The goal is to fight the ongoing opioid crisis and other addictions by targeting the supplier, especially those who prey on recovering addicts, Gavarone said.
“My stepson, who was then an addict in treatment… could leave the facility, walk a block in any direction and find someone willing to provide him heroin,” said Paul Dobson, former head of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, in testimony. “That’s why we discussed the idea that has become SB 25.”
It’s confusing, challenging, working out how to comment on this. Any way other than barely concealed, derisive snark or sarcasm would seem an evasion of how profoundly outrageous in absurdity the events and reporting are or instead, less reactively, how tragically benighted, how imposing of a sense of hopelessness for relief for Americans trapped in increasingly lethal epidemics that are features America’s operating system that cannot be uninstalled. Lethal, self-annihiliating, protected code.
And yet there it is, in a Media Report, accurately describing, normalizing and presenting itself as real, as something that could conceivably be taken seriously. Taken seriously in the year of 2022 in a population reeling from mounting deaths driven by the convictions and decades-long efforts of Drug Warriors and Drug Dispensers.
Taken seriously, but by whom possibly? By whom not already impaired by fear of dissent or escape by intoxication?
If only there were no drugs available to have, at least during treatment at the treatment program for the cure, then the disease of the brain would have been cured, and things would have been okay, on the new medications.
The treatment programs and the anti-addiction medications that have, for decades been providing cure for the disease of addiction.
Isn’t that right? Isn’t that the hope and expert assurance provided us for decades by America’s trusted authorities determining how public resources are used to help those trapped in the epidemics? Of course they must be right, and must be trusted.
“Crisis is a necessary condition for a questioning of doxa, but is not in itself a sufficient condition for the production of a critical discourse.”
– Pierre Bourdieu Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972)
In Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice, heterodoxy is dissent, challenge to what “goes without saying” – the accepted, constructed doxa, “knowledge”, reality, that goes without saying precisely because it “comes without saying”, without real scrutiny, untested, unquestioned. The function of doxa is not knowledge or truth or promotion of the collective good, but to protect and serve the interests of those with the power, the cultural capital, to create it.
