This year we lost at least 60,000 Americans to opioid overdoses and another 100,000 to alcohol related diseases. They always have a hard time getting the exact numbers. And to be clear, they never guess too high. The cause of death may be listed as something else on the coroner’s report. If we get shot over drugs or stabbed in a bar fight, drugs and alcohol walk on all charges. If we kill ourselves by other means, substance use disorder has a fall guy lined up for that as well. To put these numbers into perspective, more Americans died in 2017 from substance use disorder than Japanese died in 1945 from atomic bombs ... both bombs. It’s a good analogy because Japanese atomic bomb related deaths in 1945 are listed as “at least” 129,000. Our explosions may have been smaller, but they've left just as many permanent shadows, and we'll be dealing with the fallout for just as many generations. Grandmothers will be telling their granddaughters about the aunt they never got to meet 50 years from now. Grandfathers will tell of the unknown uncle that made it through three active combat tours in Iraq, but died alone on American soil. The waves of trauma that these deaths caused are no longer isolated ripples, they're tidal waves that are destroying entire communities; the damage from which will be visible for generations. And this has just been one more year of America’s Drug War.
When it comes to wars, no war in our history has been fought as long or cost us as dearly. Every day the tab goes up both in the blood of our people and the treasure of our nation. This is America's Hundred Years’ War. This is our Wars of the Roses, and make no mistake about it—the roses can be seen in every cemetery from sea to shining sea.
We win other wars. All we've ever known in our drug war, though, is loss. Millions of marginalized citizens are left to rot for a lifetime behind high walls and barbed wire fences as further collateral damage to our failed policies. So devastating is the failure of decade after decade of American policy makers, that no community remains untouched. We're fighting this out block by block now, house by house, in every school, in every church. There are no safe zones left in America's Drug War. The strongest heroes among us, our veterans, are now more likely to die from a needle or a bottle at home than they were in active war zones to a bullet or a blast. Men who left legs and fallen comrades on foreign soil to pay the price for our freedom, now find themselves stripped of that freedom here at home.
On the topic of Americans in war, Winston Churchill once said, "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing once they've tried everything else." Well, we're running out of bad options as evidenced by the increased market demand from fentanyl laced heroin from our most recent failed attempt to do anything but actually fix the system (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dying-to-get-high-medication-barriers-for-opioids_us_59d3c7c5e4b08c2a000ddc48). We're going to have to start approaching substance use disorder as the treatable health condition that it is, and increase access to comprehensive continuums of actual care. We don't even need to come up with a winning strategy (two of them are located here: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/saving-lives-and-money-in-the-fight-against-americas_us_5991ce47e4b0caa1687a622d and https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-to-fight-the-opioid-epidemic-and-reduce-insurance_us_5a1c8fade4b07bcab2c69932). We simply need to implement any of half a dozen solutions that have already been proposed (another one is located here: http://www.addictionpolicy.org/single-post/2017/06/23/The-House-Introduces-Bipartisan-Legislation-to-Repeal-IMD-Exclusion).
In closing, I'd like to leave you with one final thought. The explanation for why the Drug War is the only war in our history that we have been utterly unable to win is pretty simple. While America may be the best at war abroad in all of human history, we still have a long way to go to achieve peace here at home.