The Naked Truth/Jamala Rogers
Money is Not the Panacea in the War on Drugs
For people like me who have lost a loved one to fentanyl, the recent news of opioid deaths on the decline fell on tone-deaf ears. For people like me who organize in distressed Black neighborhoods and who carry Narcan daily, the reports of this promising trend did not match up with my reality. My suspicions are that the downward trend refers to the progress made in the more affluent, white communities where attention and resources have been targeted in recent years.
This family of potentially deadly drugs include oxycodone, morphine, heroin, methadone and fentanyl. The danger comes when the cheaper fentanyl is mixed with other drugs unbeknownst to the buyer. Illegal powdered fentanyl can be made to mimic legit prescription opioids. As a synthetic opioid, fentanyl is said to be 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. And because the people I call street pharmacists are doing the mixing with no regard for body size and other health conditions, overdoses are more common. It’s so powerful that death by overdose is almost guaranteed.
In my home state of Missouri, the Department of Health had declared drug overdoses (both fatal and nonfatal) as an epidemic. It’s an epidemic that transcends race, gender, age, sexual orientation and geographic regions. It is the #1 leading cause of death among adults aged 18-44 years old in a state that generally ranks low in quality-of-life indicators.
Obviously, everyone abusing opioids is not escaping pain from injuries or post-surgery medical mishaps. Far too many are trying to escape the mental pain from a desperate life of misery and disappointments. It is why the opioid epidemic looks different in Dane County than it does in Milwaukee County. Another way to look at it is to remember the racial and economic disparities between powdered cocaine associated with white, suburbanites and crack cocaine used by Black city dwellers. Drugs continue to be a driving force in the chemical warfare that plagues our urban communities of color.
For years, Big Pharma over-prescribed opioids with the complicity of greedy doctors and made billions of dollars in blood money. Hundreds of thousands have died, and millions of families have suffered profoundly. When the mountain of lawsuits finally settled against the drug manufacturers and their distributors, four of the greediest companies agreed to pay $26 billion to deal with the opioid crisis they created.
Wisconsin received a paltry $731 million; Milwaukee County will receive over $102 million. While it is touted as the largest settlement recovered by any local government in Wisconsin’s history, it must be spread over the next couple of decades. That’s less than $6 million to achieve the lofty goal of reducing fatal and non-fatal drug incidents in Milwaukee Country “with no disparities across race/ethnicity.” That is a tall order to fill — not an impossible one, but one that calls for commitment, scrutiny, and accountability.
We cannot let money obscure the loss of lives and our zest for life. The conditions that produce and sustain drug addiction must be holistically addressed. As a consequential election draws near and a divided country sharpens, voters have the power to choose between prioritizing human needs at home, and military aggressions abroad.