CATO AT LIBERTY Email Signup Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox! TOPICS Banking and Finance Constitutional Law Criminal Justice Defense and Foreign Policy Education Free Speech and Civil Liberties Global Freedom Government and Politics Health Care Immigration Monetary Policy Poverty and Social Welfare Public Opinion Regulation Tax and Budget Policy Technology and Privacy Trade Policy ARCHIVES November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 Show More NOVEMBER 30, 2021 1:09PM Dr. Wakeman’s Excellent Exposition on the Overdose Crisis By Jeffrey A. Singer SHARE Sarah Wakeman, MD is the Medical Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Substance Use Disorder Project and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard University Medical School. She has a wealth of experience treating addiction and has published research on the comparative effectiveness of various treatment modalities for opioid use disorder. Dr. Wakeman recently gave an interview to the Harvard Gazette in response to the recent news that overdose deaths for the 12 months ending April 30, 2021 reached a stunning 100,000, 75 percent of which were opioid‐related, with 85 percent of opioid‐related overdoses involving illicit fentanyl. Her exposition on the overdose crisis covered much more ground than I was able to cover in my letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal. Among the many excellent points she made was the fact that drug prohibition is a major cause of overdose deaths: The crisis and its worsening are related to a number of factors. One is the ongoing unpredictability and poisoning of the illicit drug supply. Increasingly, the drug supply is contaminated with fentanyl, and there is a lot of unpredictability in what people are using. You could compare it to alcohol, where we have a regulated supply. We of course still worry about alcohol use disorder and identify and treat it. But if you’re going to a restaurant or a bar or a store and you’re consuming alcohol, you know the alcohol level by volume content of the product you’re consuming. But imagine if you ordered a drink, and it could be 5 percent beer or it could be 80 proof liquor — that would be huge difference, and you would have no sense of how to regulate that. She also criticizes the current policy that focuses on curtailing supply and reducing prescriptions, which is an abject failure: This “let’s just make it harder for people to access it” strategy — a focus on opioid prescriptions, cracking down on the borders, increasing funding to the DEA, and increasing criminal prosecution for drug‐related charges — has been wholly ineffective. Yet that’s what we continue to hear about, even now in 2021, and that’s where our funding gets directed. I encourage readers to read the entire interview, which is available here. RELATED TAGS Health Care, Drug War This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Stay Connected to Cato Sign up for the newsletter to receive periodic updates on Cato research, events, and publications. Your Email Address Subscribe View All Newsletters 1000 Massachusetts Ave. NW Washington, DC 20001-5403 202-842-0200 CONTACT US PRIVACY Footer 1 ABOUT Annual Reports Leadership Jobs Student Programs Media Information Government & External Affairs Store Contact BLOG PODCASTS Footer 2 EXPERTS Policy Scholars Adjunct Scholars Fellows EVENTS Upcoming Past Event FAQs Sphere Summit Footer 3 PUBLICATIONS Books Cato Journal Regulation Cato Policy Report Cato Supreme Court Review Cato’s Letter Human Freedom Index Economic Freedom of the World Cato Handbook for Policymakers Footer 4 SPHERE Classroom Content & Resources Professional Development & Programming Sphere on the Road DONATE Sponsorship Benefits Ways to Give Planned Giving Meet the Development Team ALSO FROM CATO INSTITUTE: LIBERTARIANISM.ORG HUMANPROGRESS.ORG DOWNSIZINGGOVERNMENT.ORG