Drugs, death and despair | Eastern North Carolina Now

How much do you value your lifestyle, your friends, your success, and your family.  Drug users value their drugs above all of these.  Proof of how much drug addicts (users) value drugs is evidenced by the destruction and heart break they serve on their families, their children, their friends and their success, without remorse.  Very few can discontinue their addiction in or to preserve their families, friends and success.  Most ride the bobsled of addiction into the destruction of their family, their friends, and their success.  After hitting bottom most are either dead or homeless.  There are people who will serve a jail sentence rather than  take rehabilitation so they can continue to use drugs after release from jail. 

I am aware that not all sudden deaths are from natural causes.  Users struggle to reach a higher high and hold it longer.  Many eventually raise the dose to the level that stops their heart.

Several years ago people would tell me that it was harder to stop smoking tobacco than it was to stop using drugs.  I have not heard that lately.  However, I have been addicted to nicotine and quitting was very difficult. 

Considering that people will take jail time so they can continue to use drugs, admissions about being easier to stop using drugs than nicotine  justifies the high level of discipline that some users have in maintaining their work and professional lives so they can fund their addiction  My conclusion is that the illegal use of recreational drugs is predominately voluntary.

We as a nation, state, county and even family do not have a strategy to defeat drugs.  During the past ten years we have moved from fighting drugs to polite acceptance to generously providing services to the addict. Governments do not seem to be able, capable, or led to do anything that would lead to a cure.  The open borders policy of the Biden Administration facilitates the influx of cheap addictive drugs.

The invention of vape shops and their large numbers is testimony to the seriousness of the drug plague. I would say that we have more vape shops in Beaufort County than we have fast food restaurants.  With a population of about 46,000 people and about 12 vape shops, we have one shop for 3,800 people.  The rent and utilities on these shops cost about $3,000 per month.  Let us guess the cost of goods is about $4,000 per month and the profit has to be at least $3,000 per month. Customer traffic into vape shops is slow, say 6 people per hour.  Usee a ten hour day and a 30 day month and figure what you get.  That comes to 180 customers per month.  Divide that into the $9,800 and we get an average customer spending about $55 per month. This money is not for drugs, it is for the amenities, supplies and enhancements etc. that go with drug use.

Narcan is hailed by many as a great invention.  It is free if you know where to get it or you can buy it at the drug store. They say it saves lives.  I do not deny that.  Narcan is abused.  It is used by drug users to keep from dying from their experimental overdoses as they seek their version of nirvana.  Parents should become very concerned if they see their children with Narcan. 

If EMS is called to an overdose scene to administer Narcan, the law does not allow arrests to be made regardless of the number of people present and the amount of drugs that are present.  The soft-hearted liberals passed this law. They argued that druggies would not call EMS if they thought they could be arrested.  They would flee the scene, taking their drugs with them and allow the user to die.  According to the users this law saves lives.

We now have programs to assist users by giving them free needles.  Again the liberals say this saves lives because the diseases that frequent dirty needles kill people.  There are other programs that provide assistance to users because the safe and clean use of drugs is important to public health. Some misguided people believe getting to know these people will allow them to talk them out of their addiction.

The bleeding hearts hovering round the illegal drug issue are very dangerous.  I am speaking of the majority of elected officials and upper-level bureaucrats in the health field. They live in a perfect world.  They are willing to provide money and assistance to users based on the belief that doing good (their definition of good, not mine) will help these people to change their ways.  They believe buying needles, Narcan and providing money to drug users will ultimately solve the problem of addiction.  To them and those who want to profit from legalizing marijuana is doing good.  They truly believe there are medical benefits to this drug that opens the door to the use of more powerful drugs. 

The latest boondoggle is the opioid settlement. When it became apparent there would be a settlement the bleeding hearts swung into action.  The 3 million dollars of opioid money in Beaufort County is being used to hire and train coaches to talk people and addicts out of using drugs. I attended the publicity event at the Beaufort County Community College about 3 weeks ago.  Their message was, we need more money than the opioid settlement provided.  If the taxpayers give us enough money we will talk every person in this County out of using illegal drugs. 

The medical benefits from marijuana and its derivatives are largely clinically unproven. It is of concern that those benefits are attested to only in the mind of the drug user.

Every drug control law that has been passed has become ineffective because of watering down and lack of effective enforcement.  This is because elected officials are not willing to fix the problem. I believe a lot more people are using illegal drugs than anyone is willing to admit to.   Look at the number of people who cannot get jobs because they cannot pass a drug test.

All of these bleeding-heart remedies are useless.  They do provide jobs for a lot of people.  Leadership from the county thru the state and on to the federal government simply does not have the will power or desire to take illegal drugs away from their friends and themselves.  They believe their jobs are to provide “services”.

Every country that I am aware of that has defeated drugs has a zero-tolerance policy that is backed up by strict enforcement.  Many politicians are afraid of strict enforcement because of the amount of jail space required.  They erroneously believe we will need a lot of jail space for a long time.  This is not true.  Initially we will need more jail space but once the public sees that we mean business, less space will be required.  Within ten years we will have eliminated the need for one third of our jail cells, one third of our social services department and one third of our lawyers.

Beaufort County should have taken the 3 million dollars of opioid money and increased the size of the jail within the courthouse foot print in order to crack down on drug abuse.  Hiring more social workers is not the answer.

The frosting on this cake is the invention of the “mental health crisis”.  Thirty percent of the citizens of the United States suddenly become mentally unstable within the last 20 years.  How and why did it happen?  It happened because of the use of illegal drugs.  As little as one overdose can cause permanent changes in the brain and therefore behavior.  The bleeding hearts have come up with the mental health crisis to be used after all other possibilities have been exhausted in order to funnel money to people who otherwise are not disabled.  I do not mean to criticize those who genuinely have mental health issues. Most mental health issues are identified from childhood and not from the sudden event of overdosing from drugs.

This is one of those criminal issues that has become so ubiquitous that something has to be done.  Bleeding hearts, drug dealers and users want to throw money at caring for the users.  There is only one solution and that is “zero tolerance” for the presence and use of illegal and abused legal drugs. Being nice will not solve this problem.  Get behind your public officials and demand action.  We are sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand of addiction and bleeding hearts.

Do we have the willpower, courage, and honesty to enforce a drug free society?