Pimping The Obvious

WaPo:

The nation’s opioid epidemic is changing the way law enforcement does its job, with police officers acting as drug counselors and medical workers and shifting from law-and-order tactics to approaches more akin to social work.

Departments accustomed to arresting drug abusers are spearheading programs to get them into treatment, convinced that their old strategies weren’t working. They’re administering medication that reverses overdoses, allowing users to turn in drugs in exchange for treatment, and partnering with hospitals to intervene before abuse turns fatal.

“A lot of the officers are resistant to what we call social work. They want to go out and fight crime, put people in jail,” said Capt. Ron Meyers of the police department in Chillicothe, Ohio, a 21-year veteran who is convinced that punitive tactics no longer work against drugs. “We need to make sure the officers understand this is what is going to stop the epidemic.”

Officers are finding children who were barricaded in rooms while their parents got high, and they are responding to the same homes for the same problems. Feelings of exasperation course through some departments in which officers are interacting with the same drug users over and over again, sometimes saving their lives repeatedly with naloxone, a drug that reverses an opiate overdose.

How much more are we going to expect the cops to do? I like it better that they're helping people instead of shooting them, but we can't just keep piling more tasks on them because we're not willing to be inconvenienced by it all.

Anyway, isn't it amazing how "the drug problem" can move so suddenly from, "government handouts and mollycoddling won't make up for the moral deficiency of those people", to something more like, "maybe we should start looking at this as a public health issue".

And gee - it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the enormously powerful circle jerk of Coin-Operated Politicians, and their buddies in the Rent-a-Prison bidness, and the DEA as an organization of Confiscation For Fun and Profit with guns and permission to fuck you out of everything you own.

The truly obvious though, is simply that the drug thing really hasn't mattered as long as it was "an urban problem", and we were just fucking over the brown people. Now that it's come to the great American Cracker Barrel, we should try something that might be a better approach? Something we could've been doing this whole time? Because it works better? And we've always known that?

Two things:

1. I wonder how many well-connected leeches will suddenly discover their life-long passion for providing Re-Hab services - as a proper Market-Based solution, you understand -  and of course financed by taxpayers.
2. This is another one of those things the hippies have been trying to get the cement heads to understand for a very long time.

And you can color me un-fucking-surprised.