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The Opioid Crisis: The Drug Industry's Triumph over the DEA

Ummmmm republicans are the party of the drug war, mass incarceration of drug users etc... white or black. I don’t understand your point, but I appreciate you feeling the need to inject race in the conversation, very socially aware of you.

LOL. Republicans aren't for mass incarceration of opioid abusers.
 
Ummmmm republicans are the party of the drug war, mass incarceration of drug users etc... white or black. I don’t understand your point, but I appreciate you feeling the need to inject race in the conversation, very socially aware of you.

When asked about police brutality, systematic racism, or any other ill facing the AA community, many conservatives move the conversation to personal responsibility. They appear to have memorized single family household rates, percentage of crimes committed by AA's, etc. The clear message is that to solve the problems AA face, the answer is personal responsibility.

My point is simple. I have not heard or read the same solution to the opioid issue facing rural whites.
 

What? All politicians are dick heads about letting big pharma pollute the American population with opioids. Republicans differ because they want to lock people up once they get addicted because some dick head doctor prescribe a rube 180 OCs after back pain.
 
This whole thread is about how the biggest drug dealers of all are basically writing the laws.
 
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said he was "horrified" by the story, adding that he "cannot believe the last administration did not sound the alarm on how harmful that bill would be for our efforts to effectively fight the opioid epidemic."

In a letter to the president, Manchin wrote about the ability of wholesale drug distributors to send millions of pills into small communities:

"As the report notes, one such company shipped 20 million doses of oxycodone and hydrocodone to pharmacies in West Virginia between 2007 and 2012. This included 11 million doses in one small county with only 25,000 people in the southern part of the state: Mingo County. As the number of pills in my state increased, so did the death toll in our communities, including Mingo County."

Senator Joe Manchin was in office when the bill passed the Senate
 
It's not all that partisan an issue. Clinton was probably the worst president for drug policy in America. But law and order conservatives tend to force mandatory minimums that make crack (black drug) punished harsher than coke (white drug). Lots of other examples where big business pharma (white) gets to manufacture deadly drugs with impunity but harmless street drugs that lock people of color up are targeted.

I know a couple of the federal PDs around here. One was complaining recently about these 20 year mandatory minimums the federal judges have to give to heroin dealers who sold a user heroin where that user OD'd. He was saying most of those cases are just junkies from the Northern Shenandoah Valley going to Baltimore (big heroin base) buying enough for themselves and a few friends. So when you get caught and no one has died, you get almost nothing. Then when some other junkie dies, you get 20 years. And it costs us north of $35K/yr to incarcerate someone. Great use of taxpayer dollars. Also when Holder was AG, he had de-emphasized drug prosecutions. Sessions has re-emphasized them. And the reason you prosecute drug distribution crimes federally is because the federal sentences are a lot stiffer than state sentences.
 
But they can't prosecute them as easily federally due to this law. Plus, Sessions won't prosecute white people. If they were black, we'd be building new federal drug prisons.
 
Especially since I'd wager that on a per capita basis WV is one the top abusers of opiods.
 
But they can't prosecute them as easily federally due to this law. Plus, Sessions won't prosecute white people. If they were black, we'd be building new federal drug prisons.

No, the vast majority of the folks in the Shenandoah Valley are white. Lily white. Poor, white, low level distribution junkies don't exactly have a lot of political clout either.

And that's the thing about heroin use. The reason it is an epidemic is it has become big in white, suburban America over the last decade. After the docs cut back on opiate prescriptions, where were soccer moms supposed to go to get mother's little helper? The gateway drug for heroin has largely been prescribed opiates.
 
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The idea that pubs care about white redneck junkies is a new one to me. Seems like a very poorly thought out attempt at a hypocrisy gotcha
 
The idea that pubs care about white redneck junkies is a new one to me. Seems like a very poorly thought out attempt at a hypocrisy gotcha

agreed. No one thinks sympathetically towards the dirty white homeless dude meth head yelling at strangers, or the white dude covered in tats.
 
No one said they cared about them. What I said was Sessions won't prosecute them the way he would prosecute black crack dealers and users.
 
So where is this call to declare a national opioid crisis coming from?
 
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