It’s because they don’t care about the opioid problem or anything with addiction in general. And Dems do not give a damn at all about the Rust Belt or the deep south. They’ve made that clear for many years now. All they really care about are their elite east coast states and big cities. Where I live in the rural south, Dems don’t even put candidates up to run for house districts, we literally have a race between two republicans (and yet we’re told all the time by smug liberals online how we need to “vote better, vote more”)
Before they nominated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to run this Law and Order campaign, they paid lip service and gave empty platitudes with “we see you, we hear you” like when they claimed they were open to cannabis legalization. Now they aren’t even pretending to care about addicts and drug problems anymore. Cannabis legalization is completely off the table. The whole answer is going to be more police, more prisons and more dehumanization of addicts and criminals.
You know what really sucks? I live with someone who has chronic pain. Someone who will never not be in pain again for the rest of their life.
For them the only thing that helps is opiates. They need them just to hit a baseline level of pain that would still be incredibly difficult for most people (that didn't have chronic pain).
We have a drug that actually helps these people. A drug that, when prescribed and taken properly, effectively neutralized pain.
But we ruined it. Capitalism allows for the overproduction and by proxy over consumption of these drugs for profit on one swing then profit from criminalization of the drugs on the back swing.
Opiates themselves are fine. They're a tool, one that is incredibly useful in the medical arsenal. Something that can be used to improve the lives of tens of thousands that live in pain.
Opiates aren't the enemy, they're a drug. The enemy will always be capitalism and it's need to over produce to the point of utter devastation.
Now the person I live with is considering suicide. She is struggling to find a doctor that will prescribe her medication. Most of them turn her away as a "junkie" or force her to strip for examination and take a drug test to prove she isn't.
She's a 65 year old woman who can barely walk. It's humiliating. We need a cultural revolution around drugs in this country now.