To the editor:
Those were the words my friend spoke to me the year before he died from a heroin overdose. In an interview, his father explained that the son had used cannabis all the way through his opiate use, which had started with pills.
The Partnership for Drug Free Kids estimates that over half of young people who inject heroin began by abusing prescription drugs first. His father believed it would not be true that if cannabis were legal, then his son wouldn’t have abused opiates. This April, NPR ran a story about the curbing of opiate abuse by means of cannabis substitution.
Studying Medicaid records in patients 65 years and olde,r in states that had legalized cannabis, they found a 15-percent drop in opiate prescriptions. That’s an estimated 3.7 million drop in daily doses and a 1.8 million drop in the number of pills. In counterpoint, in the same article, they found that marijuana users across the country were six times more likely to abuse opiates. What explains the discrepancy?
In 2009 a movie called “The Union: The business behind getting high” was released, where they explain that because marijuana is illegal, it is often the first black market substance individuals are exposed to. According to the movie, this prompts many to distrust their early drug education programs which taught them abstinence from all drugs and exposes people to non-commercial markets they would otherwise have no interaction with. This they said puts people in the position of being more at risk for using more dangerous drugs later.
These are two sides of what is commonly referred to as the “gateway-drug theory” of illicit substance abuse, and up until last year the government staunchly affirmed that marijuana would lead to more dangerous decisions later. In February of 2017, the DEA removed the gateway drug theory argument from its website, and now there is a growing cohort of individuals (such as The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, NORML) and Americans for Safe Access (ASA), who are arguing that pot should be considered as a possible gateway-off drug so as to help in the terrible effects of withdrawal from opiates and a way to keep from relapse.
Drugs currently used in such fashion (methadone and Suboxone) are known to produce similar abuse rates as opiates themselves, and are not 100 percent effective at preventing mortality. It is important that in all years of cannabis use, it has never been the case for someone to die in the same way or at anywhere close to the scale as opiates or the drugs used to get people off opiates.
Harm reduction advocates (such as those involved with Facebook groups like Families for a Safer Drug Policy and Harm Reduction Network) understand many people’s reservations about using one drug to stop another, and that potential for abuses will always exist with certain substances and certain individuals, but maintain that saving lives by the safest and most effective means possible has to be focus of public policy. We as communities must consider marijuana legalization as a way to fight the opiate overdose scourge and its associated problems, as well as a whole suite of harm diminishment tools including needle exchanges, clean injection sites, and overdose field nurses who are trained to visit places to be frequented by heroin and hard drug addicts, in order to test for even more dangerous drugs like Fentanyl, which have a higher rate of overdose.
Larry “Levi” Voils III, Brown County
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