WHEN FIXING THE PROBLEM MAKES IT WORSE.

AuthorMangu-Ward, Katherine
PositionFUTURE

IN THE FRONT of the SUV, a man in a black T-shirt is unconscious, or nearly so, and slumped over the steering wheel. Next to him on the passenger side, a woman's bra strap slides off her thin shoulder as her head lolls. In the back, a 4-year-old is strapped into his car seat, looking oddly placid. The image, published by a local Ohio police department in 2016, is the most striking of the steady drip of such photos and videos, disseminated by well-meaning authorities with the goal of scaring the pants off of Americans and discouraging abuse of heroin, fentanyl, and other opioids.

The opioid crisis--the sharp uptick in opioid-related deaths in recent years--provides endless human fodder for local newscasts. Newspapers and magazines publish story after story about the costs of addiction to families and communities. All of this creates a powerful feeling, even among those generally immune to drug panics, that this time things are different.

A narrative has formed: Many of the people whose lives have been ruined or ended by their drug use were perfectly ordinary until they got a prescription for pain pills. The first bottle might have been legit, offered by a doctor after a wisdom tooth extraction or a broken ankle. But lurking in each pill is a bottomless chasm of physical, financial, and social ruin.

In the face of very real suffering and dysfunction, it is a deeply human response to want to use whatever resources we have at our disposal to end the crisis. But there is another deeply human response as well: the desire for a simple solution.

Luckily, according to the dominant narrative, the solution is simple. Take away the drugs and punish the people who sell them. Ta-da! Depending on your particular blend of prior ideological commitments, the drugs you are most anxious to take away will be the pain pills or the street dope; the sellers to punish first will be Big Pharma or Mexican heroin cartels.

But as Senior Editor Jacob Sullum explains in his cover story (page 18), this powerful, compelling narrative is dangerously wrong. What started as a war on pain meds hasn't come close to reducing drug-related deaths. Instead, the crackdown has escalated the problem, killing addicts and leaving patients in agony.

During the last election cycle, both campaigns treated this isssue as a dire crisis that demands decisive and immediate action. When Donald Trump won, he said he'd make the opioid epidemic a priority.

"My take," President Trump declared in...

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