There was a study where they gave rats a choice of drugs or a fun rat playground with lots to learn and do.  When they had the playground they shunned the drugs.  When just confined to a cage they took the drugs.  So I think Kristin is right, a large part of the drug problem is people in unpleasant circumstances and the worse the economy, the greater that problem.

Another big contributor, America is unhealthy due to our very bad diet, leading to disorders that lead to the prescriptions.  Then when they get addicted and can't afford the legal prescription or are cut off by the growing restrictiveness of getting them, they turn to cheap, available heroin.

And steingar is also right, it's nuts that we don't use the extremely safe and effective natural herb cannabis for certain conditions.  The medical establishment also shuns many other safe alternative treatments for example, kava is very effective for anxiety and way, way, way safer than benzodiazepines.  Valerian root and many other herbs are extremely effective sleep aids and much safer than Ambien.  I could go on and on. 

That article is very narrow, with a grain of truth but falls way short of painting the whole picture.  The black inner city community has complications that led then and still lead it's inhabitants to "need" to turn to the illegal drug market to earn money and gain status.  It's not like the small business community and job opportunities are thriving there.  I think it's not so much racism but simply that the larger general community didn't care as much until it hit them personally.  That's human nature.

The opiate problem is hitting the wider community now because of the bad economy, bad diet and health, the baby boom bump aging into the sick years of diabetes and surgeries.  It's unfair just to say doctors are overprescribing as the main cause when all these more distal reasons exist.  Also the legal restrictions contribute to the horrible outcomes.  Addicts turn to impure heroin and the needle when cut off from pills.  Addicts escalate dosage of pills containing acetaminophen because they're more common than pure opiate pills, and then destroy their livers.  Addicts overdose on an opiate usually after getting clean whether by choice or forced cold turkey because of inability to obtain the drug, and then relapsing and mistakenly going immediately back to the old dose. They die from combining opiates with alcohol or benzodiazepines.  Addicts sink farther into addiction and die because they don't seek help for fear of jail. Jailing them and giving them a criminal record creates a situation where it's harder for them to get a job when they get out, and now you're back to the unpleasant economic circumstance and the cycle repeats itself.

Cracking down on doctors' supplying pills is ineffective at curbing addiction.  However, it is very effective at making it difficult for non-addict pain patients to get the care they need. The addicts just turn to heroin and you will never stop the supply of that until you lock down the borders. That may or may not actually happen under Trump.  The solution at its most basic is first to fix the economy in general.   Also on my wish list but it'll never happen, is fix our food supply.  Healthy food is a happier brain that is less likely to seek drugs.  Drug addiction is largely an attempt to self medicate the brain diseases of our culture such as depression, anxiety, and ADHD, all of which begin in childhood when we give our kids sodas from a young age (combined with a genetic predisposition.  You could argue that sugar is a far more toxic drug than any opiate in terms of total cost to society from disease, suffering and death.) Next, education and treatment should be the focus, not criminal incarceration.  Damaging a person's ability to get and keep a job will never help them stay clean.

Our society is broken right now. Drug addiction is a symptom and a result, not the cause, if the rat experiment is to be believed.

Here are two people on the left who believe 1) That the Bill of Rights does not apply to a State Govt and 2) the Bill of Rights can be abridged at any time and to any extend.  Those two things kind of prove that they don't understand that the Constitution implements restrictions on government.  Restrictions that come and go or don't apply aren't restrictions.

First, I'm on the left?  Really?


Second:  Let's just go with the low-hanging fruit, the 1st Amendment...it begins with "Congress shall make no law..."  It expressly does not apply to state governments.  This is a simple plain-language reading.


The Supreme Court has applied the concept of "substantive due process", based wholly on the 14th Amendment, to incorporate the Bill of Rights against the States.  Personally, I would have chosen to do the same via the "Privileges or Immunities" clause of the 14th Amendment, but the Supreme Court basically repealed that clause in the Slaughterhouse Cases back in the 19th Century.


All of that said, the Bill of Rights would not apply to State actions but for the 14th Amendment.

It is my opinion that in a functioning republic, our rights are not absolute, expressly because those rights are balanced against the rights of others and the common good. We can come up with numerous scenarios that illustrate that this is the case, so I won't belabor that point. The disconnect in this discussion seems to be summed up here:

If a government can justify controlling anything about religion then it can justify controlling everything.

This is not true in our nation. We can take anything to its illogical extreme and claim the end is nigh. But, thankfully, we don't live at the extremes. Nor does our republic function at the extremes, having processes in place to protect against that. Rather, we exist in the broad middle, and we strive for sensible balance.

Even the founding fathers recognized that we can collectively justify abridging rights in some circumstances so that we may better function as a nation and so that the common good is protected. So the idea of "absolute" rights is a misnomer unless it has some definition that I am not familiar with.

Demonstrating once again that you don't know anything about conservatism. Typical Trump backer.

Been around longer than you buddy boy, and been involved enough to figure out who is what.  Religious zealots and ultra fanatics such as yourself offer nothing but rhetoric and inane diatribes.

Germany banded the Swastika, and Nazis yet welcome Islamic Fascism, which is arguably worse.  They hate Jews too.   

Absolutely moronic.

Basically, Germany has become the naive girlfriend in an abusive relationship. She seriously thinks she can change him and knows there is good in him when in fact she can't and there is little good in him. All I say is they sure know how to pick 'em. They picked the worst part of the world to import their new immigrant labor pool from. Germany has historic ties to Mexico, that's where they should have gone looking laborers.

To a Christian, the divinity of the risen Christ is a matter of faith, and so not subject to critical investigation.

To the rest of us, the historicity of Jesus is not taken for granted, and can be a serious matter of study.

And there is precious little evidence concerning the existence of a historical Jesus.

Jews face a similar conundrum. There is no evidence they were ever slaves in Egypt, and archaeologists have found no evidence of a 40 year trek in the desert, a lá Exodus.

For believers, none of this matters a whit. But for nonbelievers, these are legitimate fields of study.

And none of it is meant to "attack" anything. Unless the search for truth is seen as an attack.