There Is No Opioid Epidemic (Part 2)

Three years ago, I wrote an essay entitled “There Is No Opioid Epidemic.” It got several positive responses and, when shared by a popular Colorado yoga practitioner, became my first essay to go viral. So I assume it must’ve struck a chord with readers. Almost like, in a one-note media chorus of professional chin-waggers complaining about the opioid epidemic, readers were happy to hear somebody say their suffering wasn’t invalid.

When I re-shared it yesterday, on its three-year anniversary, a friend contacted me with her story. She suffers a chronic disability with symptoms which include immobilizing chronic pain. (This friend, and the stories she’s shared recently, have made me aware how pervasive disability-based prejudices are in American society.) She told me she’d been prescribed opioids, but had the prescription yanked, fearing she might, in the future, become addicted.

Not, please note, that she’s currently addicted; rather, that she might become addicted in some hypothetical future. Her doctor admitted that, under pressure from the DEA and other authorities, she’d been forced to restrict the number of opioid prescriptions she wrote. So my friend got handed a prescription for another drug that doesn’t work as well, leaving her in a constant state of pervasive, low-level pain—not debilitating, but restrictive.

Thinking about this, I’ve struggled to comprehend the reasoning. Clearly, the authorities responsible for regulating American drug behaviors believe chronic addiction is a worse affliction than chronic pain. We’ve certainly been conditioned to believe this through generations of “This Is Your Brain On Drugs” messages, coupled with police interventions and DARE programs. We’ve heard for years that becoming addicted is always, innately, a fate worse than pain.

British journalist Johann Hari writes, in Chasing the Scream, that Harry J. Anslinger, America’s former top narcotics officer, had a personal aversion to addicts. Owing to a complex and nuanced experience in childhood, he believed addicts weren’t just suffering, they were actively bad people. Because Anslinger had a hand in negotiating the end of World War I, President Wilson gave Anslinger a blank check for his post-war public service career.

Anslinger chose to dedicate his life to punishing addicts. He chaired the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (forerunner to the ONDCP) for thirty-two years, one of the longest public appointments in American history. Using this leverage, he pushed legislators to enact laws intended to punish addicts, enforce private morality, and force people to be, in Anslinger’s view, good. All because Anslinger had an inflexible moral attitude.

Harry J. Anslinger, near retirement in 1962

Even this explanation doesn’t really satisfy. Though the unprecedented power Anslinger enjoyed (if that’s the word) allowed him to enforce his moral prejudices, President Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971, nearly a decade after Anslinger retired, and years after abundant science demonstrated that many illegal drugs, particularly cannabis, aren’t that dangerous. Clearly the prejudice persists beyond one person’s preconceptions.

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s former deputy, admitted to a journalist that the administration turned hostile to drugs, in brief, because they needed camouflage. Busting drugs became a convenient legal condom that allowed Feds to harass Civil Rights leaders and anti-war demonstrators without contracting the taint of racism or war-hawk-ism. In other words, for Nixonites (and Reaganites after them), addicts were bad people because they were different.

This has been extensively documented. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander records that, though it’s illegal to stop somebody simply because they’re Black, race is nevertheless an acceptable qualifying condition. In other words, police can randomly stop somebody because they’re Black and something else. The law is so inclusive that “something else” can include basically anything that a reasonably healthy imagination could conjure. And it’s almost always something drug-related.

So basically, when drug enforcement officers force my friend’s doctor to take her off pain control medications that work, and put her on something marginally better than a placebo, they say they’re preventing her from becoming an addict. But really, they’re preventing her from becoming a nonconformist. Our drug regulations, which doctors must comply with to remain licensed, are based on moral fears of hippies and African Americans. We can’t let a White woman become… that.

It boggles my mind that, in 2020, these prejudices remain so persistent. Worse, the moral panic surrounding opioid “abuse” has been perpetrated by media forces marching in lock-step. The same newsrooms that want congratulations for holding Donald Trump to account, continue reinforcing Harry J. Anslinger’s class-based prejudices, and Nixon’s racism. Eighty years later, it’s time to show some moral independence, and let these old, outdated ideas finally, mercifully, die.