Lawmakers missed the deadline to renew a law supporting treatment and recovery.

America’s drug overdose crisis is out of control. Washington, despite a bipartisan desire to combat it, is finding its addiction-fighting programs are failing.

In 2018, Republicans, Democrats and then-President Donald Trump united around legislation that threw $20 billion into treatment, prevention and recovery. But five years later, the SUPPORT Act has lapsed and the number of Americans dying from overdoses has grown more than 60 percent, driven by illicit fentanyl. The battle has turned into a slog.

Even though 105,000 Americans died last year, Congress is showing little urgency about reupping the law since it expired on Sept. 30. That’s not because of partisan division, but a realization that there are no quick fixes a new law could bring to bear.

  • Vent
    934·
    8 months ago

    Have they considered doubling the number of prisons and providing police with tanks?

    • tjarod11@lemmy.world
      112·
      8 months ago

      Don’t give them ideas. They’ll have everyone and their mothers working in a private prison factory by winter!

      • dan1101
        5·
        8 months ago

        Everyone’s either a convict making products or a guard, it’s the perfect citizenry!

    • eestileib@sh.itjust.works
      178·
      8 months ago

      No, this is seen as a drug that white people are addicted to.

      Treatment and compassion only.

      (Not joking)

      • Vent
        261·
        8 months ago

        America’s response to the opioid epidemic is a far cry from treatment and compassion. They’re literally charging friends (addicts) of overdose victims with murder just for being associated by redefining “drug dealer” to be super broad and reclasifying ODs as poisonings.

        Amazing read: He Tried to Save a Friend. They Charged Him With Murder.

        Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed a law this month to reclassify fentanyl overdose deaths as “poisonings,” and Arkansas passed a “death by delivery” bill in April to charge some overdoses as murders in an effort to deter anyone from selling or even sharing fentanyl. Prosecutors in Alaska, California, Florida and at least a dozen other states were beginning to pursue new murder cases against any defendant who fit under the wide-ranging definition of a fentanyl dealer: a 17-year-old in Tennessee who, after graduation, shared fentanyl in the school parking lot with two of her friends, both of whom died; a husband in Indiana who bought fentanyl for his disabled wife, who overdosed while trying to numb her chronic pain from multiple sclerosis; a real estate agent in Florida who threw a party and called 911 when one of her guests overdosed; a high school senior in Missouri who gave one pill to a 16-year-old girl he met at church and warned her to “only do a quarter and then do the other quarter if you don’t feel it.”**

      • Chetzemoka@startrek.website
        13·
        8 months ago

        Yeah…as a white person from Appalachia that’s definitely not the case in large swaths of the country where the actual plan is “fuck those poor hillbillies, let em die.”

        • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
          7·
          8 months ago

          Yeah… It was a culture shock going from Marietta/Parkersburg area to college in Akron … just in terms of like “wait, you went on vacation out of the country!?”, “cedar point wasn’t the vacation but just a thing you did one, two, three, many times during the summer?!”, etc

          Pretty much fully incognito as a college educated urbanite now, but the roots are still there…

          • Chetzemoka@startrek.website
            4·
            8 months ago

            Oh hey there, MOV. I probably know your family lol. I grew up in Belpre. And I hear ya about the culture shock. It took me a long time to realize that Appalachian is a thing I can identify as

        • blazeknave@lemmy.world
          72·
          8 months ago

          You guys aren’t “that” kind of white. I’d guess the Appalachian racism was a pivot from Irish targeted hate, and got a pass to keep going through the years bc poor and Catholic.

          • Chetzemoka@startrek.website
            6·
            8 months ago

            Correct. While technically “white” in that I am able to access the benefits of white privilege by masking my accent and dressing “fancy,” we are not the WASPs most people think of when they think “wypipo”