Author: Josie Williams

By Ranarda Wright

A staggering 87,000 people died of a drug overdose in America in the 12 months ending September, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I’m a veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces. I’ve seen other veterans become part of this statistic, and it doesn’t have to be this way. We can save thousands of lives when we recognize two things: First, drugs are not the problem. Human suffering is. Second, most people who are dying of an overdose today have taken unregulated, contaminated drugs that were bought on the street.

The day-to-day suffering in people’s lives is not an easy thing to fix. I joined the military right out of high school. Through my years in the service, I became a listening ear often to others who wanted to share their lives and talk through problems.

I saw people struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder and others develop substance use disorders. Approaching my last enlistment with 17 years of service, I went back to school for formal training because I wanted to be a supporter. Today, I am practicing as a licensed professional counselor and clinical director working with clients who are struggling with mental health diagnoses and substance use disorders.

My professional training confirmed my personal experience. My colleagues who were struggling weren’t bad people, they were hurting people. Drug use isn’t the problem, it’s a solution attempt. Trauma, relationships and finances are some of the most frequent problems that people are trying to solve with drugs. This is why the criminal justice system doesn’t work well to stop people’s drug use. It adds more trauma, broken relationships, and financial hardship to a person’s life.

Instead of increasing suffering through criminal justice involvement, what can we do to help people heal?

We can invite them to treatment with a non-judgmental approach. We can pave the way for them to gain the appropriate rehabilitation through available funding. We can be cheering for them even when everyone else in their corner has stopped. This is really hard, especially when someone’s drug use has caused so much pain to them and their family. But if we want better outcomes, we have to stop throwing gasoline on the fire. New trauma doesn’t heal old trauma. Instead, we can take steps to help people find hope, healing, and connection when they’re open to it.

The problem of a contaminated street drug supply is also challenging. As prescription pills have become harder and harder to get, more and more people are buying drugs from the underground market. Buyers don’t know how potent the drugs are because there’s no regulation or quality control. This is unfortunate as the consumed amount to get high can end up killing them instead.

For people with an opioid misuse disorder, medication-assisted treatment can help. This form of treatment involves the use of medications being prescribed under the care of a physician in combination with counseling and behavioral therapies to assist individuals in their recovery process. It not only helps people stop using contaminated street drugs, it’s the most effective form of opioid addiction treatment for many people.

Drug use and overdose are complex problems, but there are better solutions. We can save the lives of more veterans as well as our friends and family members. If we want to decrease drug use, we must focus less on the drugs and more on the pain people are trying to solve with each use. If we want to decrease overdose deaths, we must expand access to medications that can help stop the use of contaminated drugs and get help for the addiction at the same time.

Ranarda Wright is a practicing licensed professional counselor and clinic director from Jackson. She received her undergraduate degree from Jackson State University and her graduate degrees in Education and Mental Health Counseling from Mississippi College.

By Carr McClain

Gen. William Sherman said, “War is cruelty. You cannot refine it.”

Our generations-long War on Drugs should be viewed through this prism. The damage wrought by this war is too great. We must come together as Mississippians and as a nation to discuss the way forward.

The destruction of people that accompanies war is inevitably justified by appealing to the righteousness, or at least the utility, of the cause. In cases like the War on Drugs, where those arguments fail, the cruelty of war is thrown into even sharper relief.

How did a cardiovascular surgeon become passionate about drug policy? A lifetime ago I was an excited young conservative Republican. William F. Buckley, Jr., was the smartest man on my Earth.

Twenty-five years ago his magazine, National Review, wrote:  “…it is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is encouraging civil, judicial and penal procedures associated with police states.”

This was always my intellectual position, but my career put a more personal stamp on the issue.

I did my residency in general surgery in Richmond, Virginia, at one of the country’s busiest trauma centers. Richmond was a key city in the East Coast illegal drug trade, and I was faced with caring for many teenagers and men who sustained gunshots — often from each other, sometimes from police — as armed gangs fought over drug territories. Law enforcement officers were occasional casualties as well.

The volume and severity of injuries would leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that this was indeed war. Picture a teenager, his arm nearly severed at the elbow by an AK-47 round. If the picture is from a combat zone in Africa, how easily we react with pity for that child, press-ganged into a war, not of his own making. If the picture is from an American trauma center, how quickly do words like “thug” and “gangbanger” appear in our minds?

We make the cruelty of war bearable by creating psychological distance between ourselves and those we define as adversaries.

But those “adversaries” are not always armed and dangerous. Often they’re our own family members, struggling with a substance use disorder.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data from 1999 thru February 2019, show that over 770,000 Americans died of drug overdoses — many the result of intravenous injection of drugs, often opiates. The current opioid crisis began in the late 1990s as a surge in the use of prescription narcotic pain medication. The ensuing “crackdown” on prescriptions led, as prohibition always does, to increasingly powerful versions of heroin, then fentanyl, supplied by the illicit market.

My current career in heart surgery exposes me to a new group of war casualties: patients whose intravenous drug use has resulted in endocarditis — infection and destruction of one or more valves in the heart. I can replace a destroyed heart valve, but I cannot protect my work if these patients cannot get treatment for their primary illness: addiction.

The War on Drugs in America saves its greatest cruelty for addicted people. In our efforts to create the psychological distance necessary for war, we take refuge in terms like “junky,” “dopehead” and “scumbag.” Drug addiction is the one illness that we too often treat not with doctors, nurses and medicine, but instead with handcuffs, jail cells, and criminal convictions carried for life.

We all have different perspectives on this war, shaped by our values, our education, and our life experiences.  I know we all want the same things: safety for our children, less crime, fewer destroyed lives. It’s time we stopped fighting, time we removed these products from the criminal realm, and time we legalized and regulated them, as we do other dangerous substances like alcohol and prescription drugs.

Dr. Carr McClain is a cardiovascular surgeon at Forrest General Hospital. He lives with his family in Hattiesburg.

By Ken Flynt

Mississippi has 78 people each serving 50+ years in prison on a non-violent drug charge, with no eligibility for parole. Twenty-one of them are serving that sentence for simple drug possession. This is a waste of taxpayer dollars and people’s lives, and it does nothing to actually address our drug problems.

Paul Houser, of Caledonia, is 11 years into a 60-year sentence for drug possession. Because his sentence prevents parole and earning time off, he will serve every day of it behind bars. That makes him eligible for release when he is 104 years old. We have effectively sentenced him to death in prison for possession of a controlled substance. It is legal for us to do this, but that does not make it right or helpful.

First, lengthy sentences like Mr. Houser’s are costly to taxpayers. These 78 people have already served 1,108 years behind bars, costing Mississippians $16 million. If we do nothing and they serve their full sentences, we will pay a total of nearly $70 million just on their sentences. That does not account for the thousands of others churning through our prisons who are serving sentences less than 50 years on nonviolent drug charges.

Second, lengthy sentences do not decrease drug use or addiction. Drugs are readily available in every prison in this country, so prison certainly is not going to stop anyone from access. It may actually drive them to addiction or make an addiction worse, because our prisons are filled with horrific levels of physical and sexual violence, and research is clear that trauma increases the risk of addiction. Using trauma to address an issue made worse by trauma is counterproductive at best and inhumane at worst.

Third, lengthy sentences do not decrease the sale of drugs. As long as there is demand for a product, there will always be a supplier. We can – and we have – filled our prisons with people charged with selling drugs, and yet drug availability remains untouched. This is predictable because it is the basic economics of supply and demand. Our refusal to allow a regulated market for substances has forced that market underground, where it operates on street corners. But when we take one person off the street corner who is selling and incarcerate them, another person takes their place a few hours later. That street corner currently represents cash. As long as there is demand for a substance, there is cash to be made and a never-ending stream of people willing to break the law to get it. Finite tax dollars locking up an infinite supply of people simply has not worked.

We don’t have the choice for no one to use or sell drugs. But we can choose to address drug use as the complex health issue it is, through prevention and treatment. We can choose to address the drug market by taking these substances off street corners and putting them behind counters where we can regulate potency, purity, and age of access. On the street corner, no one is checking IDs.

Mr. Houser’s drug use is a complex health issue that should have been handled as such. Addressing it through the criminal justice system has failed to help him, failed the taxpayers, and failed to decrease drug harms. Legal regulation is not a perfect solution, nothing is. But it is one of the biggest steps we can take to be fiscally responsible, decrease our prison population, and address drugs and addiction in ways that reduce harm and move Mississippi forward.

 

Ken Flynt is retired from the Bio-Technology industry. He lives in Bailey, MS. 

By Brett Montague

For more than a century now, America has struggled to combat the harms of drugs. Today, we continue to suffer unnecessary drug-related losses through overdose and incarceration at alarming rates.

Right here in the Pine Belt, I have met with police officers and elected officials, among others, to learn about cases where their own families have suffered unecessary harms through death or long-term incarceration from drug use.

One case I learned about this year involves a young lady named Nikki.

Nikki is a native of Madison and the mother of a newborn child, but she has also spent recent years fighting off her opioid addiction, even during her pregnancy.

As a result of her prenatal drug use, her child was immediately removed from her custody and she was handed a 15-year prison sentence, which she is now serving in a north Mississippi prison.

Nikki is responsible for her actions, of course, but what about the rest of us?

Aren’t all individual persons responsible for their own actions and reactions?

If so, then are we not responsible for our response to her prenatal drug use?

Is ripping her child away from her and throwing her in jail actually going to help?

This made me wonder, what if we changed our drug laws and enacted policy that minimizes the harms of drugs and increases thriving through second chances for everyone?

As you begin to consider this question yourself, I will go ahead and admit three difficult, but honest points.

First, this is a difficult and complex issue and we must be able to distinguish the differences between drug use and drug dealing or trafficking. Organized crime and drug cartels are a big source of this problem and they should never be granted any clemency for being a scourge against humanity.

Next, the notion of drug policy reform will undoubtedly be a subject of national debate for some time to come – perhaps even into the 2030s.

Lastly, I will admit that this issue of drug policy reform only grabbed my attention following the fallout of real-life, drug-related cases from within my family and my work life.

And since this has become a top-shelf, personal issue for me, I’ve also come to realize though how many other Pine Belt families have been affected by the opioid epidemic.

What I have gradually realized is that the current overdose crisis we are facing does not discriminate.

Addiction does not care about our social status, our race, our religion, etc., and according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, we are losing 201 people a day to drug overdoses – including 130+ attributed to opioids.

Here locally, having listened and learned about some of these heartbreaking cases has only increased my hunger for the status quo to change.

In an effort to make a small contribution, I spent some time during the course of the past year forging community relationships pertinent to drug-related issues and by the time last summer rolled around, I was fortunate to have had several good discussions.

It was because of those discussions that last July I found myself as the point person for a local community opioid and drug policy summit held at Lake Terrace  Convention Center.

I worked closely with a colleague from Madison named Christina Dent to plan the event. Christina’s organization, “End It For Good,” is a non-profit entity that organizes community-based discussions like the one held here about drug policy.

During her presentation, Dent focuses on the prospect of ending the so-called “War On Drugs.”

Initially, we talked about getting 25 to 30 local leaders together for a discussion.

To our pleasant surprise – and shock – we had 120 people from throughout the Pine Belt show up and participate in the discussion.

Participants from all walks of life came to the event, including those from political, legal, and law enforcement officials to people in the private sector including pharmacists, bankers, and mental health professionals.

Recovering addicts, family members of addicts, and members of the local religious community were also in attendance.

We even assembled a formal host committee consisting of nine prominent individuals representing educational institutions and other local businesses – including The PineBelt NEWS and its sister publication, Signature Magazine.

Although the size of the crowd surprised us, it clearly demonstrated there is an appetite for continued, exploratory drug policy reform discussion in our community.

Maybe it is because drug use and addiction has left virtually no family unaffected.

Maybe it is because, according to the Mississippi Department of Corrections, we have more than 3,800 non-violent drug offenders currently housed in the state prison system that costs taxpayers some $68 million annually.

Maybe it is because we know deep down that we all have our own little addictions (whether it’s spending too much time on Facebook, drinking too much coffee, or spending too much time binging on Netflix).

Maybe it is because we realize that drug addicts deserve love, compassion, and healing.

Regardless of the reason, I wonder what would happen if we changed our drug laws and enacted policy that reduces the harms of drugs?

As we leap into the new “Roaring ’20’s,” I challenge you to consider that question.

If you or someone you know is curious enough to join us for another non-threatening, drug policy reform discussion in 2020, we invite you to the table.

Together, we can embark on this journey of hope, healing, conciliation, and consensus.

Montague is a Hattiesburg native and a staunch advocate for drug policy reform in the Magnolia State. Last fall, he served as emcee of the “End It For Good” summit where attendees discussed the opioid crisis and how drug policy impacts local communities like ours. His background is in human resource management and organizational development.

By Christina Dent

What in the world is Kratom and why is it in the news?

The answers to these questions and how we respond to them will either increase public safety in Mississippi or undermine it.

First, what is Kratom?

It is the dried and ground leaves of a tree found in parts of Southeast Asia. It has been used for hundreds of years for a variety of health reasons, and has become popular in the US recently, often sold as a dietary supplement.  In low doses people who use it report mild pain-relieving qualities and more energy.  In large doses it can act as a sedative. Some people also find that Kratom halts the body’s opioid withdrawal symptoms, helping them discontinue opioid use.

So, why is Kratom in the news?  Last April, a number of media outlets covered a report by the Centers for Disease Control that had analyzed over 27,000 overdose deaths in 2016-2017 and indicated 91 of them could be linked to Kratom.  What the CDC report mentioned, but was rarely included in the media reports, is that virtually all of those 91 people had other drugs in their system.

Kratom is not illegal under federal or state law, but several Mississippi counties have recently made it a crime to use or possess Kratom, with more considering it under pressure from law enforcement and some concerned citizens.

While I sympathize with their concern for public safety, turning a person who uses Kratom into a criminal and putting that person in jail is the wrong approach. Just like any other substance, legal or illegal, Kratom can be misused and we need to treat that misuse as a public health issue and not as a criminal matter.

If we treat it as criminal, we will undermine public safety.  Here’s why.

First, banning a popular substance does not make it disappear.  It simply transfers the substance from a legal market, where we have the option to regulate it, to the black market where we have zero regulation.  This market transfer increases crime by providing a revenue stream that entices people to break the law to get a share of the profits. This decreases public safety.

Second, criminalizing a substance makes it more available to our children. In a regulated market, we can set age limits for purchasing. Certainly some youth find their way around that, but most legal retailers are checking IDs.  On the street corner, no one is.  A 13-year-old and a 33-year-old have the same access to prohibited substances, and those substances are available on the streets of every town in America today. This decreases our children’s safety.

Lt. Eddie Hawkins, with the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, was recently quoted in The Daily Times Leader stating his concern over the way Kratom is currently sold. “There’s no quality control, no dosage limits, no age limits.” He’s right, but criminalizing it ensures that those things continue.

Third, the black market sells any concoction they want, with a strong profit incentive to pack the biggest punch in the smallest package to avoid detection while smuggling. This lack of regulation over purity and potency is how we got fentanyl-laced substances on the street.

In a recent interview published by the Hattiesburg American, alerting the public to fentanyl-laced meth in the Pine Belt, John Dowdy, Director of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, said, “People need to understand – if you’re buying any kind of narcotics on the street – whether you think it is a legal prescription or not – you’re basically playing Russian Roulette.”

While we may categorically disagree on the best path forward, I wholeheartedly agree with him that using unregulated substances is like playing Russian Roulette. This reality should make us take a long pause and ask ourselves why on earth we want our loved ones playing Russian Roulette with yet another substance, when we’re losing so many people to overdoses already from unregulated drugs they bought on the street.

It is human nature to want a quick and simple solution to every problem.  But the quickest path to making Kratom dangerous is to send it into the free-for-all of the black market. If we want to reduce harm and increase public safety, we have to keep Kratom legal.  Let’s age-restrict it behind a counter, not send it to the street corner.

Christina Dent is Founder of End It For Good, a conservative nonprofit advocating for an end to our criminal approach to drugs. She hosts the End It For Good weekly podcast and lives with her family in Mississippi. 

By Bradley Wellborn, Esq.

There are 121,000 Mississippians currently in need of treatment for substance use disorders, according to Dr. Mary Currier, the State Medical Officer. But in all of Mississippi there are a total of 501 beds, certified by the Department of Mental Health, to treat such disorders. Mississippi, like the rest of the nation, is in the midst of an opioid epidemic. Large numbers of our citizens have become addicted to legal drugs, prescribed to them by medical professionals.  Our response has been to answer this epidemic with abrupt prescription crack-downs, thereby encouraging a migration to illegal drugs as a replacement.  The result has been a doubling of fatal overdoses in Mississippi, which plainly reveals the ineffectiveness of our current strategy.  Treating addiction as a criminal matter is wrong and does nothing to solve the underlying problems faced by these Mississippians.

For us, this epidemic is still in its early stages, but the coming crisis is so clear that major public figures, such as Marshall Fisher, head of Mississippi’s Department of Public Safety, and Dr. Currier, have spoken out on the limitations of law enforcement and the state’s health system to either stop, mitigate, or manage the damage that is being done to our communities and our broader society.

Not only do we have far too few beds available for treatment, there is no tracking or coordinating technology to effectively match patients to beds. There are scarce resources to manage patients awaiting beds, and predictably some patients who desire treatment become more firmly addicted after waiting overlong for those beds.

Historically, Mississippi has relied upon law enforcement and the courts to deal with substance use issues. Unfortunately, neither were designed as regulatory or preemptive agencies. Still, 20% of Mississippi’s inmates, 38% of our probationers, and 48% of our parolees are there on drug charges. At the cost of $18,615 per year (plus medical expenses) to house a single prisoner at Parchman Penitentiary, we are using a vast amount of resources on an ill-fitting solution.  Incarceration does little to rehabilitate, isolates individuals from family and other positive allies and resources, and ultimately creates the need for the taxpayers to expend more resources after imprisonment on welfare and recovery systems.  The criminal justice system is not the right tool for a public health crisis.

We have 121,000 Mississippians currently outside the prison system that struggle with substance use disorders.  Many of these have underlying mental health issues.  Yet statewide, we have the ability to treat only 501 at a time.

Mississippians must recognize the coming threats and reexamine our ultimate objectives in order to develop better, cheaper, and more effective responses to substance use.

Clearly, we must increase capacity to effectively treat substance use disorders.  The Department of Health has unequivocally stated the need for more beds and better technology to coordinate the use of those beds for maximum effect.  We should develop these capacities now, before our health systems are completely overwhelmed.

We must also find new tools to prevent substance use disorder and help people who are struggling with it.  At every opportunity, we should divert them away from the criminal justice system.

We should also develop support and counseling networks at the community level.  Imagine churches and community organizations throughout the state offering their facilities and a few volunteers to host a weekly telehealth counseling session for those in their local community.  Matching the substance use and mental health resources available in Jackson’s premier medical community with local social networks would enable coverage to every corner of the state at very low cost, and would alleviate many problems related to our backlog of treatment needs.

It is time to treat substance use and mental illness as health issues.  The criminal justice system is the wrong tool for the task.

Bradley Wellborn, B.A. & J.D. from Ole Miss, is a former Navy officer, former Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, Eagle Scout, and maintains a general practice law firm in Jackson.

Today in Mississippi, taxpayers are funding two contradictory approaches to people struggling with drug addiction.  One approach results in an arrest and possibly jail time.  The other approach offers people health-based treatment.  Both are paid for by taxpayer dollars, and they’re both used with the same people struggling with the same problem. But one uses fear, trauma, and isolation. The other uses safety, therapy, and community. The disparity is striking, but this is what our drug criminalization laws have given us. We will continue the troubling response of prison sentences for people struggling with a health crisis until we change our laws and end our criminal approach to drugs.

Mississippi was recently awarded a $3.6 million federal grant to respond to the opioid crisis, and 100% of it is being used on health-based initiatives. This is great news because it meets the health issue of drug use with an appropriate response. Eighty percent of the grant is paying for in-patient treatment for people without private insurance. Fifteen percent is providing expanded access to naloxone, an overdose reversal medication. The remaining 5 percent funds community outreach such as the “Stand Up, Mississippi” campaign.

It ought to give us pause that millions of our own taxpayer dollars are being spent responding to the same issue with prison sentences.  When people with a health issue are labeled criminals and forcibly separated from their families and communities, that’s harmful. When we saddle them with a criminal record for life, making them virtually unemployable and unable to provide for their families, that’s harmful. Drug use and addiction can be devastating to individuals and their families. Our response should focus on reducing that harm, not escalating it by labeling their medical crisis as a criminal offense.

Ending our criminal approach doesn’t mean that people who use drugs can do whatever they want to. If a parent is abusing their children, they will be arrested for breaking laws against child abuse. That’s true right now whether you’re high, drunk, or sober. It will still be true after we lay down our criminal approach to drugs. The same is true of laws against other aggressive acts like theft, rape, and murder. We can end criminalization of drugs and retain all of our laws against harming people. This is how we treat alcohol, and it’s how we should treat other drugs as well.

Ending our criminal approach to drugs would free up millions of dollars that could be redirected to address these health issues in ways that are grounded in research and science. It would reduce stigma so that people could admit their need for help without the shame of being labeled a criminal. Moms and Dads wouldn’t be locked away for years of their children’s lives for making some unwise choices. Sons and daughters wouldn’t be crippled with a lifetime criminal record before they even graduate high school.

We can help people regain their sobriety and give them tools for a new life with this grant money, but as long as we’re also pouring resources into destabilizing the same people with the same health problems by criminalizing them, we’re undercutting our potential and crippling our prosperity.

Conservative people like me want strong families and productive citizens, and this grant is helping us towards that. But we’re simultaneously supporting laws that destroy families and cripple employment. We need to be courageous enough to chart a new course towards more people flourishing by ending our criminal approach to drugs.