Speaking at the National Rx Abuse and Heroin Summit in Atlanta, John Eadie, coordinator for the National Threat Initiative, warned, “We’re now facing a very significant stimulant epidemic.” Abuse of prescription stimulants such as Adderal and Ritalin (used to treat Attention Deficit Disorders) as well as illicit stimulants, like cocaine and methamphetamine, are surging. “No one is paying attention to this,” Eadie said, because the focus has been on opioids.
Law enforcement has seized 15 kilograms of stimulants for every kilogram of heroin it has seized during the last 5 years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that psychostimulant overdose deaths rose 30 percent in the past year. There is evidence to suggest stimulant abuse is now outpacing opioid abuse. And the Drug Enforcement Administration reports that cocaine use and availability are at their highest level in a decade.
I wrote here about the resurgence of methamphetamine abuse once meth labs, especially in Mexico, found a substitute for Sudafed after the federal and state governments made it more difficult to obtain. And Oregon health authorities reported overdose deaths from heroin dropped in 2016 to 107 while overdose deaths from methamphetamine rose to 141.
There are lessons to be learned from this news if anyone chooses to learn them. The obvious one is that the “War on Drugs,” America’s longest war, is unwinnable. This lesson was apparently not learned when the nation experimented with alcohol prohibition in the early 20thcentury. When a market exists for willing buyers and sellers, prohibition just drives that market underground. Waging a war on drugs is like playing a game of “Whac-a-mole.”
But the other lesson relates to current opioid policy. Policymakers seem stuck in what should, by now, be an obviously false narrative: that the opioid overdose crisis is a product of doctors prescribing opioids to their patients. And even after considerable reductions in the prescribing and manufacturing of opioids for patients has shifted non-medical users over to heroin and fentanyl—now the dominant causes of opioid deaths—policymakers can’t disabuse themselves of this false narrative. They continue to double down on restricting prescriptions of opioids and make many patients suffer in the process.
The opioid overdose crisis has always primarily been the result of non-medical users seeking opioids in the illicit market—where the dose, purity, and even the actual identity of a substance can never be known with confidence.
The resurgence of stimulant abuse and overdose should not be viewed in isolation. It should be integrated with the opioid issue. Both should be viewed in the broader context of substance abuse in the presence of drug prohibition. Sociocultural and psychosocial factors may ultimately explain why the use and abuse of mind altering drugs is on the rise across much of the developed world.
As long as policymakers continue using supply-side interventions, hoping to win an unwinnable war, the problem will continue to grow.