Media Disinformation and the US Heroin Epidemic
The New York Times Gets it All Wrong
Global
Research, January 29, 2016
New
On October 30, 2015 the NY Times published an in-depth article
on the heroin epidemic, focused on New Hampshire, which saw the greatest
increase in deaths from drug overdoses (74%) in the US between 2013 and 2014.
New Hampshire is a bucolic place, where villages of tidy white capes and
saltboxes lie sprinkled among the mountains and pine forests.
Manchester, New
Hampshire’s largest city, has a population of 110,000. In one 6 hour
period on September 24, Manchester police responded to 6
separate heroin overdoses. Manchester saw over 500 overdoses and over 60
deaths between January 1 and September 24, 2015.
At presidential
campaign stops throughout the state, candidates were forced to respond to the
problem when New Hampshire citizens demanded answers. Hillary
has a $10 billion dollar plan for prevention and treatment of abuse.
Chris Christie prefers treatment to jail time for first offenders. Obama
announced a $5 million initiative in August to combat heroin addiction and
trafficking. NH has designated a drug
czar. NH
Senator Ayotte says “We’ve got to reduce the stigma.” Narcan, an opiate antidote that has been
made widely available, is admittedly
a band-aid. It saves lives from acute overdoses, but does absolutely
nothing to stem the tide of abuse.
The solutions being
touted by politicians and the media include “working together:” police,
citizens, and health-care facilities–though to what end is unclear; educating;
reducing the stigma of heroin use (now that users are predominantly white and
middle class we can relabel addiction a disease, not a crime); adding treatment
facilities; and adding more police.
I call this
salutary–but almost entirely missing the mark.
Overdose deaths and
heroin users are at an all time high in the United States. Between 2 and 9 of
every thousand Americans (0.2-0.9% of the
population) is currently using heroin. In Maine, 8% of babies are born
“drug-affected”–a stratospheric rise from
178 babies in 2006 to 995 babies in fiscal 2015.
Despite what you have
heard, the cause of our current heroin epidemic is not as simple as doctors
overprescribing narcotics.
While
nationally, heroin
overdoses jumped from 1.0 per 100,000 in 2010 to 3.4 per 100,000 in 2014,
the number
of prescribed narcotics held steady over the same period. A 2015
UN document noted that “A recent [US
government] household survey in the United States indicated that there was a
significant decline in the misuse of prescription opioids from 2012 to 2013″ (page 46).
According to CDC
itself, “CDC has programmatically characterized all
opioid pain reliever deaths (natural and semisynthetic opioids, methadone, and
other synthetic opioids) as ‘prescription’ opioid overdoses.” That
means illegally produced drugs in these categories are being designated as
prescription drugs, when they are not. A further confounder is that heroin
metabolizes to morphine, which is a prescription drug. So if fully metabolized
at the time of autopsy, a death due to heroin will be labeled as due to a
prescription narcotic.
The true cause of the
current heroin epidemic is massive
amounts of heroin flooding into the US, exceeding what can be sold in
our large cities, and now finding its way into even the tiniest hamlets.
Here’s the problem
with the NY Times’ and the politicians’ solutions: neither fifty
individual states nor thousands of towns and villages can treat, educate,
exhort, investigate or imprison their way out of the heroin maelstrom. There are nowhere near enough police,
social workers, prisons, treatment facilities or sources of funding. Narcan and clean needles don’t cut the
mustard. There is only one possible
solution, and that is stemming the supply.
In my September
7 blog post, I showed that 96% of US heroin does not come from Mexico and
Colombia, as claimed by US government sources. Mexican and Colombian production
is inadequate to supply even half the US market.
At least Canada knows
where its heroin comes from:
If one wants to get
into the weeds on this issue, a 2014 RAND
report titled What
America’s Users Spend on Illegal Drugs: 2000-2010 is a good place
to start. The report, performed under contract for DHHS and
released by the White House, looks at multiple databases and identifies
many problematic issues with estimates of heroin country-of-origin.
It shows that while
Colombian opium was allegedly supplying 50% of a growing US heroin market
between 2001 and 2010 (pages 82-83), Colombian production actually sank from 11
metric tons in 2001 to only 2 in 2009.
Furthermore, US government
estimates for the 2000-2010 decade of Mexican production relied on a claimed 3
growing seasons per year, while in reality there were only two. RAND
admits Mexican production estimates were inflated. Mexico historically produced
lower quality, “black tar” heroin, used west of the Mississippi, while the
influx of heroin to the US has been of higher quality white powder, and the
greatest increases in use have been in the eastern US, far from the Mexican
border.
Meanwhile, according
to RAND:
“in recent years,
there have been no [heroin] seizures or purchases from Southeast Asia [Myanmar,
Laos, Thailand] by DEA’s Domestic Monitoring Program.”
Back in 1992, DEA
estimated that 32% of US heroin came from Southwest Asia (mainly Afghanistan).
Since then, Afghan
opium production has tripled. But in the years 1994 through 2010 only 1-6%
of US heroin had a southwest Asian origin, according to DEA’s Domestic
Monitoring Program. Yet Afghan
production accounts for 90% of the world heroin supply.
It would be great if we could point to improved US
interdiction at the source, or to poppy field eradication to explain this
anomaly. But neither is the case. Seizures of heroin in Afghanistan
dropped from 27 metric tons in 2010 to 8 metric tons in 2013, according
to the UN, figure 41. Only 1.2%
of poppy fields were eradicated in 2014, also according to the UN.
It is undeniable:
there has been profound, systematic deception regarding the amount of heroin
reaching the US from Mexico and Colombia by the US government, presumably to
conceal and protect the actual source(s) of most US heroin.
We know where and how
to look for heroin: Afghanistan and Myanmar are the world’s #1 and #2
producers. Historically, heroin bound for the US leaves these countries
by air. There are a manageable number of flights departing Afghanistan and
Myanmar. We could put all the needed personnel in place, today, to fully
inspect every flight and every airport.
The fact that we have
looked the other way and pointed in the wrong direction is itself the smoking
gun.
Meryl
Nass, M.D.
is a board-certified internist and a biological warfare epidemiologist
and expert in anthrax. Nass publishes Anthrax Vaccine.
The
original source of this article is Anthrax
Vaccine
Copyright ©
Dr. Meryl Nass, Anthrax
Vaccine, 2016
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