According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), “Every day, more than 115 Americans die after overdosing on opioids.”
The federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) pegs the economic cost of prescription opioid abuse at nearly $79 billion annually in the United States, “including the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice involvement.”
Closer to home, the Albany-based Rockefeller Institute of Government, in a new report, makes this summary, “We found that drug deaths continue to surge in New York State. In one year, from 2015 to 2016, drug deaths increased 29 percent — from 3,009 total deaths to 3,894. In fact, it was the single largest annual increase in the number of deaths we examined
going back to 2010. Overall…from 2010-16 there has been a 121 percent increase in the number of deaths in New York State.”
That’s just a small snapshot of what we’re facing. It does not even begin to tell the personal, family stories of loss.
In 2014, the New York State Senate created our Task Force on Heroin and Opioid Addiction, on which I serve as a member. Local police departments and addiction centers at that time, including many across the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes regions, were warning about the alarming rise in the availability and use of heroin and opioids.
Over the past several years, while the task force’s work has helped enact and initiate important new state-level laws, programs, services and other responses, the crisis has grown increasingly urgent. The input we have received – and continue to receive – from the local front lines of this public health and safety crisis have targeted the necessary responses.
Still, the overriding message has been this one: We cannot let up, not for one second. The threat of heroin, opioids, meth, synthetic substances, bath salts and other illegal drugs continuing to spread like a wildfire throughout our communities is the number one public health crisis facing us today. It represents far too great a risk to spiral out of control, overwhelming and destroying individual lives along with local systems of health care, law enforcement, criminal justice and social services.
My state Senate colleagues and I remain hopeful that the new state budget will include a record level of state funding to continue to establish state-operated addiction treatment centers, enhance community-based providers, and expand other programs and services to bolster New York’s education, prevention, treatment and recovery strategies.
Nevertheless, we cannot overlook the law enforcement piece of the necessary response. I agree that we will not arrest our way out of this crisis. I also don’t believe we will treat our way out of it, especially not until we throw the book at the pushers and suppliers of these deadly drugs. Last week, that’s exactly what the Senate did. In particular, we once again targeted the traffickers and dealers of deadly drugs by approving legislation (S2761 ) I co-sponsor to allow law enforcement to charge drug dealers with homicide if the drugs they sell or supply results in an overdose death. The measure targets mid- to high-level drug suppliers who profit from these sales. The penalty would be a Class A-1 felony, carrying a penalty of 15 to 25 years in prison.
Awareness and education, and prevention and treatment are fundamental responses.
Tough laws and law enforcement are too.
I recently read the following statement from a law enforcement agent in a state that allows homicide charges for drug dealers, “There are people who are out there to turn a profit on people’s misery.
Those are the people we’re targeting. Our goal always is to move up the chain and to hold accountable the actual dealers.”
Exactly.