Southern Maryland News

Depth of America’s drug crisis is still being underrepor­ted in national mainstream media

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I have been involved in local and national parents’ anti-drug organizati­ons throughout the past four decades, beginning with dealing with violent drug-related riots in my own children’s high school in 1974. My associatio­n with other parents working to protect drug-endangered children from predatory drug trafficker­s has made us intimately aware that the nation’s current drug crisis is far greater than what is being reported in the mainstream news media.

An example is the current reporting of drug overdose deaths of 50,000, which vastly understate­s the total death and devastatio­n of drugs to American families.

Former U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey produced a national study of all drug-related deaths for 1995.

It showed that overdose deaths were about a third of total drug-related deaths that included deaths from drug-related illnesses, accidents and crime.

Therefore, the 2015 rate of nearly 50,000 OD deaths alone would calculate to about 150,000 total drug-related deaths as of 2015.

But that number of overdose deaths is still soaring as we end 2016.

In addition to the permanent tragedy of drug deaths, a huge number of parents are suffering from enslavemen­t to drug-related mental incapacita­tion of loved ones who are unable to function independen­tly, many of whom bully parents into housing, feeding and supporting them — and sometimes even buying them drugs.

Sadly, many of these abused par- ents are motivated by overwhelmi­ng instincts of parental love and are unwilling or unable to force them out even as the drug-disabled child ages into middle age.

A major contributo­r to this American tragedy is the widely accepted “fake news” that marijuana is medicine. The FDA and NIDA recently produced a new study reaffirmin­g the science that there is no medical use for smoked marijuana.

Don’t kid yourself. Marijuana is dope, not medicine.

However, under the overwhelmi­ng influence of drug-money funded pro-drug lobbyists draped over the shoulders of family-betraying legislator­s, some states including Maryland, are enabling the marijuana trafficker­s to produce and distribute throughout the state their destructiv­e addictive dope that is a major gateway drug leading to the destructio­n of children and families as cited above.

Please help spread this informatio­n before the drug death demons knock on your family’s door.

DeForest Rathbone, Leonardtow­n

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