Crackdowns aren’t enough

It turns out that you can’t solve a drug crisis simply by unleashing law enforcement. Closing pill mills and jailing the operators and suppliers, as impressive as that is, gets you only so far. You also must address the medical side of things, lest you leave thousands of people stranded, with nowhere to take their cravings but to the next available fix.

The moral of the story: It wasn’t just Big Pharma and a big drug cartel that fueled this crisis. Florida bears a heavy share of the responsibility.

Having done so much to create the mess, Florida now bears an equally heavy responsibility to clean it up. And on this score, the state is negligent.

Drug addiction, as Beall notes, is a physiological disease of the brain. Yet the state pays scant attention to treatment. Its small substance-abuse unit isn’t even in the Department of Health, but in the perennially cash-strapped, overburdened Department of Children and Families.

Dozens of license applications for methadone clinics have been in limbo or denied since 2003, when the state passed a law that bars the creation of new clinics unless their need can be proved. Predictably, “the number of people getting state-financed addiction treatment dropped by 19,500 between 2011 and 2015,” Beall writes, “a time when 19,000 Floridians overdosed and died after using heroin and prescription opioids.”

Just this month, 33 mental health and substance abuse facilities that treat inmates across Florida are closing or scaling back because the new state budget cuts $30 million from Department of Corrections programs that help alcoholics and drug users prepare to move back to communities.

It’s past time to do a 180 on this unconscionable business-as-usual. Floridians must demand that lawmakers put more money into treatment and reverse the impediments to methadone, which the National Institute on Drug Abuse, citing a wealth of studies, calls “an effective treatment for heroin and prescription narcotic addiction.”