New Administration Can’t Abandon Parity in Midst of Addiction Crisis
On Tuesday, January 24, former Congressman Patrick Kennedy announced the Kennedy Forum’s initiative, a Mental Health and Addiction Guide for the 115th Congress. He unveiled the online parity registry and presented the information to a congressional audience at the Russell Senate Office Building. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Senator Ed Markey and some members of Congress spoke, as well as Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy. Dr. David Satcher, Surgeon General between 1998 and 2002, also addressed the large crowd.
Mental Health and Addiction treatment often go hand in hand. Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of NIDA (National Institute of Drug Abuse) spoke, too. Two mothers who experienced denial of coverage for children with mental health/addiction problems recounted their stories. A large number of mental health care advocates were also in the audience.
Congressman Fred Upton of Michigan was also a speaker at the event at the Russell Senate Office Building on January 24. He is shown here with former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, right.
Although the Trump Administration promises to replace the Affordable Health Act, we cannot give up on treating mental health. In fact, mental health and addiction treatment need to be front and center of any health care legislation. All of us have seen photos of parents passed out in cars from accidental overdoses, toddlers in tow. The more 52,000 drug overdose death in 2015 are a national tragedy. We will continue to lose too many young people this way, if we don’t treat the addictive disorders. The number of drug deaths far outstrip any other accidental cause of death, including guns and vehicle crashes.
History of Parity Legislation
A member of Congress between 1994 and 2008, Representative Kennedy sponsored legislation requiring mental health parity, and worked diligently for its passage. Since President George W. Bush signed the legislation back in 2008, insurance companies must give equal health care to mental and addictive disorders.
However, violations continue. “We are literally living in denial when we refuse to acknowledge that this law is being blatantly disregarded on a daily basis, leaving millions of Americans unable to access needed mental health and addiction treatment and services,” Kennedy explained. That is why the Parity Registry, sponsored by the Kennedy Forum is important. By logging onto parityregistry.org, those with an insurance issue may network with others, get advice and take action.
There are rumblings that the new administration will try to get rid of mental health parity. Drug abuse deaths and overdoses account for far more deaths than any other accidental cause, more than 52,000 in 2016. It would be the absolute worst time in recent history to get rid of mental health and addiction treatment. Those who are ages 25-34 are dying at a rate five times the death rate for those ages in 1999!
Mental Health and Physical Health: It’s All Connected Anyways
New studies are relating childhood mental health to trauma, often because of addicted parents. Studies suggest that treating mental health issues at the onset of problems will prevent later addiction and mental health issues. Early traumas are also related to heart disease, cancer and autoimmune diseases. So treating the mental health issues at the source is important to avoiding all kinds of health care costs later.
The US has experienced crushing health care costs from the diabetes epidemic. However the rate appears to be going down slightly because Americans are listening to warnings. We now know the epidemic is partially caused by the over-consumption of sugar, processed food and fast food. Let’s do the same for mental health care and addiction avoiding many of the variables that feed into mental illness and addiction.
Just as avoiding sugar may guard against diabetes, avoiding marijuana may guard against mental illness, psychosis and suicide attempts. Avoiding marijuana while young also helps prevent the gateway effect into other drugs. Drug overdose deaths have doubled since 2004. The rate of increase in drug-related deaths has been increasing dramatically since 2012. Legalized marijuana began about this time, also.
The Kennedy initiative pushes for the incorporation of mental health assessments and addiction education into early childhood education. Parents Opposed to Pot also supports early anti-drug and addiction education. We encourage parents not to use marijuana and other drugs to protect their children’s mental health. We believe the high use of marijuana by teens today is feeding more drug addiction in the future.
Patrick Kennedy says it’s time for the political science to catch up with the neuroscience of addiction. Last November he participated in a forum on the use and misuse of addictive substances. The Kennedy Forum, Kennedy founded One Mind for Research, a global leader in open science collaboration in brain research. Patrick is the son of the late Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy.
The New Director of White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) must deal with urgent problems. There’s a drug overdose epidemic from heroin, opioids and onslaught of synthetic drugs entering our country. Furthermore, 25-34-year-olds are dying from drugs at a rate 5 times what it was in 1999. (In 2000, NORML attacked ONDCP Director Barry McCaffrey’s campaign against drug use in the television ads. McCaffrey, ONDCP Director from 1996-2001, is pictured above.)
For the next ONDCP Director, we need someone who acknowledges that marijuana causes psychosis, mental illness and addiction. We need someone who recognizes that allowing states to legalize marijuana contributed to the growth of heroin addiction and deaths. This person must be familiar with addiction to all classes of drugs, as multi-substance abuse is the trend today.
Independents, Democrats and Republicans support Parents Opposed to Pot, as well as a large number of parents in Mexico and Canada. What we do in the USA, helps other countries, or in the case of marijuana, harms them. We’re bi-partisan, like the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which created the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Parents Opposed to Pot has more advocates in Colorado than any other state. Colorado parents were blindsided with legalization and forced to address an aggressive marijuana industry. The next ONDCP leader will need to speak out about how decriminalization is different from legalization. Minorities are hurt by legalization more than others, because commercial marijuana preys on communities of color or impoverished places.
The next director will know that marijuana legalization did not replace cartels, but expanded the cartels’ US heroin sales. The heroin epidemic has many causes, but legalization of marijuana provided an opening and the cartels took advantage. As one former prosecutor said, “Legalization doesn’t discourage the drug dealers and cartels; it emboldens them.”
The next ONDCP director will know that marijuana use is directly connected to heroin abuse. (A video on the bottom of this article explains this concept well.) Currently, six percent of high school seniors are daily marijuana users. These heavy, early pot users are conditioning their brains for other addictive substances, too. Moreover, the studies of Yasmin Hurd find evidence that marijuana primes the brains of offspring for heroin addiction. (Professor Hurd is Director of the Center for Addictive Disorders, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.)
William Bennett, author of the Book of Virtues, as ONDCP director in 1989-1990, was a forceful spokesperson against drug usage. He had served as Education Secretary and head of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and had a commitment to children.
The United States leads the world in drug use, with about 56% of the world’s drug users. Demand reduction and prevention education should be a priority of the new ONDCP director. Although there are useful aspects of “harm reduction,” it is far less effective in saving lives than “demand reduction.” The evidence is in the US death rate from drugs. We need renewed education efforts in elementary schools.
We’ve Screwed up Our Country, Now Let’s Get it Back
Since legalization means promotion, the ONDCP director will need to counter the fact that legalization equals commercialization. The marijuana industry is looking for more and future users and the youth of America fits the bill.
Colorado has gained the most notoriety of the legalization states. Much of the American public doesn’t understand the difference between decriminalization and legalization. Diane Carlson, co-founder of Smart Colorado explained: “Many people thought they were voting to decriminalize marijuana. Colorado already had decriminalized marijuana. To the surprise of many, legalization led to full-blown marijuana commercialization practically overnight.
It’s not a “state’s rights” issue because commercial pot from legal states gets into the other states. Interstate drug commerce is still illegal. The problem is so widespread that other states have sued Colorado.
The next director will need to understand why marijuana does not replace pain medications. Promoting non-medical ways to address pain, such as MBSR and EMDR, should become a priority with Americans. For those with addiction, substituting one addictive substance with another addictive substance only compounds their problems. The ONDCP Director should be someone who can be outspoken on this issue.
Bringing Back Cabinet Level Status to the Drug Czar Will Save Lives
Parents Opposed to Pot believes this position needs to be elevated to the cabinet level position it once was. If it is reinstated as the “Drug Czar” position, it will have some moral standing working against the scourge of drug deaths.
Attorney General Eric Holder made the bad decision to allow marijuana commercialization in Colorado and Washington in 2012. Holder acted as if it was state’s rights issue, a big mistake. His Justice Department issued eight guidelines that states had to follow to avoid federal prosecution if they legalized pot. Then the Justice Department did not follow its own guidelines.
President Obama’s first ONDCP Director, Gil Kerlikowske, had been the Police Chief of Seattle. Marijuana activists thought he would be sympathetic to their cause, but he recognized the relationship between marijuana and crime. Michael Botticelli followed Kerlikowske as ONCDP Director. He recognized the dangers of marijuana and did not support it.
President Obama’s downgraded the role of ONDCP Director which is no longer a cabinet level position. This re-assignment went along with a massive escalation of drug use and drug-induced deaths. President Obama may have responded to pressure by the drug lobbyists. Ironically, former Vice-President Joe Biden had coined the term “Drug Czar” in 1982.
Let’s put strength back into America’s resolve to end addiction and death by drugs!
Parents Opposed to Pot’s mission is to bust the myths about marijuana. Below, we tackle the lies told by marijuana promoters by shedding light on the truths. Informed parents and their children should learn these truths to counter the most popular lies.
1) It causes death. The most frequent types of deaths are suicide, murder, traffic fatalities and child abuse deaths. Just because toxic overdose from pot is rare doesn’t mean that deaths don’t occur. BRAIN DAMAGE is quantitative too. A doctor from the Netherlands, Dr. Martien Kooyman, said chronic marijuana use is “more dangerous than chronic heroin use.”
2) Marijuana is NOT safer than Alcohol. The percentage of adults age 21 and over who use marijuana in the U.S. is roughly between 10% and 13%, vs. 65% who use alcohol. Around 10-15% of drinkers have a substance use disorder, vs. 30% of marijuana users who have Cannabis Use Disorder. If people use marijuana to the extent they use alcohol, the damage will surpass the damage caused by alcohol.
In 2010, there were 450,000 emergency treatments from marijuana. The rate of marijuana use has quadrupled in the last 20 years. It is the second most common substance, after alcohol, involved in D.U.I. incidents. M.A.D.D. states that drugged driving deaths will soon surpass drunk driving deaths by 2020, if current rates continue. When a Lie Travels explains why marijuana is not safer than alcohol.
3) It is Addictive. Since denial is a characteristic of addiction, marijuana addicts often don’t know they’re addicted. The older studies showed an addiction rate of 9% for adults and 17% for teen who smoked pot. They do not account for the high THC pot of today. Recent studies show that about 30% of current users in the U.S. have Cannabis Use Disorder.
Drug Policy Alliance, NORML and Marijuana Policy Project are optimistic. They’re huffing and puffing now, having won 7 out of 8 states with marijuana ballots in the November election. They also smirk knowing that President-elect Trump supports states’ rights for marijuana. In 20 or 30 years, they’ll have freedom and no one else really matters.
Pot lobbyists don’t explain the real picture. What if the whole country ends up just like Humboldt County?
The oldest, strongest marijuana culture in the USA is not in Colorado, but in Humboldt County, California, part of three-county region called the Emerald Triangle. REVEAL, an online investigative platform, reported on the secretive world of sexual abuse and rapes in marijuana country. (The pop culture magazine Rolling Stone doesn’t want the public to know.) There’s politically-motivated denial and deflection, but heavy weed smokers have lots of delusions.
There were 2,000 domestic violence calls in 2015, an increase of 80% over the previous four years.* A routine domestic violence call in December led to a huge bust for guns and weed. Marijuana gained a foothold in Humboldt nearly 50 years ago, and it seems guns and weed are a way of life since that time.
Humboldt County leads the way in environmental destruction, too. The area used to be dominated by the logging and fishing industries. But as those jobs went away, marijuana became the biggest industry.
See the video about the ecological damage from illicit marijuana grows
Environmental Damage
Environmentalists convinced politicians that the logging industry must stop cutting down the redwoods. So the marijuana growers found an opening and they’re clearing out the trees! Aerial views show the redwood forests pockmarked by marijuana grows. It doesn’t seem that High Times and Alternet have caught on to the irony that marijuana green is not environmentally green.
In May of 2008, approximately 1000 gallons of red diesel overflowed from an indoor marijuana grow’s fuel room into a creek. A marijuana grower had left a valve open when pouring a larger diesel tank into a smaller one. The fuel had spread so far down the rugged stream bed that a neighbor smelled the pungent odor and investigated. He found “20 to 30 pools of red diesel” far below the spill. The environmental cleanup was a massive operation, one of the biggest in California history. The damage from this diesel fuel spill rivals the impact of an oil spill in the ocean.
Marijuana and Fire Damages
Fires are frequent throughout California, and marijuana sometimes causes these fires, including hash oil (BHO) explosions. The massive Soberanes fire this summer uncovered several illegal marijuana sites. Marijuana growers may have started the fire.
The true irony is that after recreational marijuana was legalized in Colorado, these home explosions grew more frequent. In one week of April 2014, there were four BHO explosions. BHO fires didn’t occur in California before 2010, so liberalizing pot laws and expanding marijuana access created a new problem. (In 2010, pot was decriminalized in California.)
The man who started a fire in McKinleyville on December 26 fled the scene. It’s thought to be a hash oil lab fire. Photo above and on top by Marc Davis, published on the Redheaded Blackbelt.
Murders, Suicides and Missing People
If a tv news magazine were to expose the murder, rape and sex trafficking in Humboldt, reporters may be at risk. An investigative journalism report released in September revealed that some trimmigrants and girls end up getting abused or raped. The marijuana apologists mislead by insisting that murders and rapes happen because prohibition forces growers into hiding.
There were at least 22 murders in Humboldt County in 2016. Only 134,000 people live in the county. (Often it’s difficult to distinguish murder from suicide, which occurs at a rate twice the national norm.) Humboldt reported 352 missing people in 2015, more per capita than any other county in the state.
Nonetheless, Humboldt County has wonderful examples of love and community spirit. Recently, residents of Eureka came out in the heavy rain to honorJennika Suazo, a teen girl who died suspiciously.
Domestic Violence, DUIs and Humboldt’s Other Problems
Humboldt County district attorney Maggie Fleming sat down for an interview with Paul Mann of the Mad River Union recently. (The entire article is in Lost Coast Outpost.) “We see DUIs all day long in this community …. There are people who are drinking or using prescription meds or smoking marijuana or using methamphetamine or heroin and driving at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Some of our fatalities are in the middle of the day,” Fleming explained.
She listed multiple factors powering Humboldt crime: high rates of driving while intoxicated; the county’s nightmarish marijuana, drug and alcohol culture; the prevalence of domestic violence and the deep-rooted poverty that inflicts childhood trauma and impairs children’s health, often with lifelong afflictions, including criminal behavior. She definitely sees the crime as a result of the drug culture. Both those with substance abuse problems and those selling drugs for financial gain instigate the crime.
“I see firsthand how marijuana is a social and environmental disaster,” a policeman from the Emerald Triangle wrote to PopPot.org. “Youth access, abuse, transient population moving in to grow or trim, associated criminal behavior all rising.”
The homeless population in Humboldt creates a dilemma. Here’s what was left when several squatters were forced out of a Eureka home on Oct. 31, 2016.
“Where there is pot …there are other drugs…..and all the behavior associated with lives less enabled,” he said. “The money isn’t worth the social cost to our world.”
–Emerald Triangle policeman
Having a marijuana culture adds to the use of other drugs. Laid back from smoking too much dope? Try amphetamines to get back up again.
Acceptance of drugs also leads to rampant alcohol abuse; booze enhances the effect of the drugs. People think the homelessness problem in Humboldt is caused by mental illness, but one social worker in the area disagrees. He is certain that rampant drug/alcohol abuse precipitates the problem. Politicians in both parties remain clueless about how drug use creates mental health problems. Their ignorance will continue as long as it’s politically incorrect to blame pot for anything.
Seven hundred homeless children without parents or guardians in nearby Mendocino County, also part of California’s “Emerald Triangle” growing region. These street kids sometimes work on the pot farms, but basically, no one has ever loved them enough to care for them. They’re likely to become drug users too, and the cycle of multi-generation drug use will continue.
Pueblo is a Warning to Other Places
Four years after Colorado legalized marijuana, the small city of Pueblo is another example of how pot commercialization can destroy life for the residents. “I can no longer allow my 13-year-old to walk the dog, one mother said. There was recently a murder 3 blocks from our house.” Pueblo failed to pass two referendums which would have closed dispensaries and growing sites in the city and county. Some people think of marijuana as an economic panacea for lost jobs in the steel industry. However, it has created a huge increase in the homeless population. Pueblo doctors recently made videos showing the damage marijuana is doing to the health care in the community.
Buyers in Pueblo West, Co line up on Jan. 1, 2014 to legally buy marijuana when the state’s first pot shops opened. (Source: AP Photo/John Wark). The Press prefers to emphasize that so much money can be made, rather than the destruction with legal pot. It hasn’t turned out as orderly as this photo.
International cartels have moved into Pueblo and bought up property for their marijuana grows. The black market is booming. Russians, Cubans, Argentinians and Cambodians have come to town. Pueblo, Boulder and Denver lead the state in the percentage of high school students using pot, but in Pueblo there are more problems. Fully 12% of high school seniors have also used heroin.
What about America’s future? Is marijuana growing also going to replace tobacco growing in Kentucky and Tennessee? Will it be a substitute for the coal mines that shut down in West Virginia and Pennsylvania? When policy is driven by knee-jerk reactions without careful planning, chaos follows.
At this time, the United States has more than half of the world’s illicit drug users. Six percent of America’s high school seniors are daily marijuana users. It appears that the legacy of drug use is going to continue creating this problem for America’s children. Humboldt County is the future of our country if we continue to believe marijuana use is perfectly harmless and normal.
* This statistic and much of the information on sexual abuse, missing persons, domestic violence, rape and abuse of trimmigants comes from the massive report by Shoshana Walter, published in Reveal, The Center for Investigative Reporting on September 8, 2016.
