A Rough Alternative to This Life
Chesa Boudin on the growing population of fentanyl users:
“As long as we have people who are addicted to drugs, who are willing to destroy their own bodies and their own lives, no amount of investment on the law enforcement is going to solve this problem,” he said.
The question one must ask: What in this life makes people willing to “destroy their own bodies and their own lives”? If the story of modern society is objectively worth enacting, why are people rejecting it, to the point that they’d rather die on the streets?
Some numbers from the Wall Street Journal article:
- “A projected 88,295 people in the U.S. died from overdoses in the 12-month period that ran through last August, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- In all of 2019, there were 70,630 drug deaths, a record that was likely broken last year.
- According to the DOPE Project, naloxone (Narcan) was administered more than 4,300 times in San Francisco last year, up from 2,610 in 2019.
- San Francisco police seized 5.5 kilos of fentanyl in the Tenderloin last year, up from 1.2 kilos in 2019.”
Drug overdoses have been compounded by the pandemic, where local, state, and federal mandates isolated people psychologically and physically. Or as DOPE’s Kristen Marshall says:
The best practice to reduce the risk of Covid is isolation. Isolation is also the thing that puts people at the absolute highest risk of overdose death.
Experts have concluded that the only way to combat drug addiction is medication. Not a better life, not an alternative to this one, but more drugs. When we double down on the technologies that are failing people, we will always lose the so-called “War on Drugs”. According to these people, the only way to win the War is with better guns.
Step back from the particular drug of the day and see what is happening: A growing population is seeking alternatives to this life in any way they can, and they found the rough way out.
My suggestion: End the combat, and figure out where we have failed to develop suitable alternatives to isolated, lonely, desperate, globalized society that are pushing these people into drug addicts. And if it isn’t feasible to enact those alternatives, we’re not in such a free country after all.