Issue Position: Heroin

Issue Position

Stronger Together Plan
Three components:

*Treatment
*Education
*Enforcement

The heroin epidemic is ravaging Upstate communities and destroying lives. Overdoses are up exponentially. In many cases, isolation, hopelessness and family breakdown are feeding the social conditions for such drug abuse. Conventional law-enforcement techniques will not work to solve this crisis and may in fact contribute to an increase in crime among addicts to supply their habit.

Stronger Together would pursue a multi-faceted approach to heroin addiction. The goal is to dramatically reduce drug abuse and save lives. The federal government spent more than $26 billion in 2015 on drug-control efforts yet the rates of abuse and overdoses are skyrocketing. We can do better.

Education -- Early intervention models for abusers of opioids are failing. Once someone gets hooked on prescription pain-killers at $70 per pill, a deck of heroin for $10 becomes a rational and cost-effective alternative; and by then it may already be too late -- 30 to 40 percent of people get addicted the very first time they try it. The heroin crisis is a problem of both supply and demand. The 19th District needs more resources at the county and local level, including public awareness and prevention programs similar to D.A.R.E. making school-aged young people and adults aware of the dangers of painkiller abuse, School Resource Officers, and an effective, nationwide electronic prescription-monitoring system. A mass-media public education campaign, funded by the federal government, needs to be undertaken to warn the public to the addictive nature of prescription pain medications and how these are the usual path to heroin. We must seek to reduce demand for these substances by alerting the public to the extreme dangers inherent in painkiller abuse.

Treatment -- A restorative model such as "drug courts" offers an option to non-violent offenders who agree to treatment in exchange for reduced sentences. Drug-court applicants MUST finish their course of treatment, however, to be eligible for leniency. More access to quality treatment options need to be made available, including expanded inpatient and outpatient care. A typical 28-day detox treatment is insufficient to deal with those affected by heroin or prescription painkiller addiction. Those admitted to emergency rooms for heroin overdoses must be referred to detox treatments for their own safety. Currently, many such patients are simply released and they invariably begin using again. Law enforcement has even reported administering repeated Narcan doses to the same individuals. The Centers for Disease Control has recently promoted stricter guidelines for prescribing prescription pain killers, which are often the gateway into heroin. The medical professional and pharmaceutical industry must re-evaluate pain treatment protocols recognizing that current approaches are leaving many vulnerable to addiction.

Enforcement -- The United States must secure its border with Mexico, the point of trafficking for the majority of heroin that comes here. We also need a new strategy for dealing with the source of this drug: Afghanistan and Pakistan -- which makes it essential that we defeat the Taliban traffickers who use opium as a major source of funding. While offering non-violent offenders a chance at treatment in exchange for good behavior, we must also step up penalties for drug lords and traffickers. After two years of trying, Ulster County is the only 19th District county to be included in the Office of National Drug Control Policy's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program. This needs to change. My plan would expand the HIDTA footprint to target the so-called "Paterson Pipeline" funneling cheap, deadly drugs into the 19th Congressional District. Local law enforcement needs to receive additional support for interdiction efforts.

Law enforcement is already overstretched. We need to provide the resources they need to get the job done and partner their efforts with elements in the judiciary, prosecution, mental-health specialists, social services, and treatment professionals. New York's I-STOP and similar prescription-monitoring programs have been known to cut rates of opioid misuse by providing doctors with a patient's controlled substance prescription history. However, physicians who may be filling prescriptions in violation of their professional oath also pose a risk. A recent Boston Medical Center study found that over 90 percent of people who survived a prescription opioid overdose were able to obtain a prescription for the same drug. We can protect patients by fixing the state medical licensing loophole: If an MD is found guilty of defrauding a federal insurance plan, that doctor should be precluded from prescribing pain killers as a condition of medical licensure.

Source