Neuroscientist Dr. Carl Hart: People Are Dying in Opioid Crisis Because of Politicians Ignorance

I have listened to him a few other times. He is good.


Neuroscientist Dr. Carl Hart: People Are Dying in Opioid Crisis Because of Politicians’ Ignorance


https://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/27/neuroscientist_dr_carl_hart_people_are




October 27, 2017


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Guests

Carl Hart

chair of the Department of Psychology and professor of psychiatry at Columbia University.

Links

"People Are Dying Because of Ignorance, Not Because of Opioids"
"High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society"

President Trump announced Thursday that he is directing the Department of Health and Human Services to declare the opioid crisis a public health emergency—walking back his plans, announced in August, to declare it a more serious “national emergency.” The shift means the federal government will not, as of now, direct any new federal funds to address the opioid crisis, which killed 64,000 Americans last year. We speak with Columbia University psychology and psychiatry professor Carl Hart, who argues people are dying because of ignorance, not because of opioids.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
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AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean: “People are dying because of ignorance, not because of opioids.”

CARL HART: Well, you just played Trump, and what the people just heard was ignorance. And that’s why people are dying. We’re not really addressing what the real issues are.

It’s really simple. We think about the opioid deaths. Number one, people said—like the number you said, I think 64,000. That’s not opioid deaths only. There are other types of death that are occurring. That is all drug sort of deaths, including antidepressants, including all of those other drugs. And so, we have to be careful about inflating these numbers, one.

But the fact that people are dying because of opioids, that’s a real problem. And when we think about the deaths themselves, most of the people are dying in large part because they combine opioids with another sedative, like alcohol, like a benzodiazepine. A benzodiazepine is something like Xanax. They also combine opioids with older antihistamines. Those sorts of things, they increase the risk associated with opioids.

But a major—another major problem people are dying is because they think that they may have something like heroin, when in fact they have something like fentanyl. Much of the heroin on the street today is now being tainted with this drug called fentanyl. Fentanyl is about 50 to a hundred times more potent than heroin, just simply means that less of the drug is needed to produce the required effect. But unsuspecting users may take the amount that they usually take with heroin, thinking that it’s heroin, when in fact it’s fentanyl.

OK, so we say, “How do we fix this?” This is really simple. What we can do, we can simply set up free drug purity testing sites. They do this in Spain. They do this in the Netherlands. They do this in Switzerland. It’s really simple. That way, when people understand what’s in their drug, they can scale back their use or not use it. Free drug purity testings would tell you the complete composition of the drug that you have. So if you want to save lives, you can set that up easily. Doesn’t cost that much money. People are talking about, “We need more money! We need more money!” Maybe you need some more money, but let’s make sure we use the money smartly.


I’m concerned that if we add more money, we will send most of the money to law enforcement. And when we do that, we know what happens. We saw it with crack. We saw it with opioids before, in the 1960s. What happens is more black and brown people will be arrested. Do not forget that........................................