Popularization of Worse Drugs

Here’s drug czar John Walters shamelessly using a young woman’s death as an opportunity to plug student drug testing:

Heroin killed 19-year-old Alicia Lannes, and her parents say she got the drug from a boyfriend.  Experts say that's how most young kids get introduced to drugs: by friends or relatives.
…
While teen drug use is declining, Walters says a Fairfax County heroin ring busted in connection with Lannes' death proves it's still a problem.  He supports a federal program used in more than 4,000 schools to randomly drug test students.

"There's no question in my mind had this young woman been in a school, middle school or high school with random testing," said Walters, "She would not be dead today." [FOX DC]

Walters sounds supremely confident, as usual, yet the reality is that random drug testing is often impotent when it comes to discovering heroin use. Student drug testing programs typically rely on urine tests, which can only detect heroin for 3-4 days after use. Only marijuana -- which stays in your system for up to a month – can be effectively detected this way. Thus, random testing actually incentivizes students to experiment with more dangerous drugs like heroin that increase your chances of passing a drug test.


And thanks to the complete failure of the drug war, heroin is stronger today than ever before:

The drug enforcement agency says the purity of heroin found in Virginia is typically higher than usual—making it more deadly.

"They tend not to know how to gauge the strength and they usually take more than they need to," said Patrick McConnel, who oversees Treatment for Youth Services Administration Alcohol and Drug Services.

There are no easy answers here, to be sure, and I don’t claim any monopoly on the solutions to youth drug abuse. But I guarantee you that the problem isn’t our failure to collect more urine from young people. As long as the most dangerous substances continue to be manufactured, distributed, and controlled by criminals, the face of our drug problem will remain the same.

Oddly, the Drug Czar has created a new webpage that offers great tips for any teen looking to catch a buzz. The page claims to be a warning guide for parents, but the potentially deadly secrets contained within it are available for anyone to see. I was able to access all of the site's content without even being asked to verify that I'm over 18.

I've learned to steal drugs from the elderly because they don't monitor their pill count or throw away leftovers because they're super old and confused. Also, there's like a billion websites that don't even check prescriptions and will send me anything. I'm gonna go cure my boreditis now. Thanks, Office of National Drug Control Policy!

You can urine test them. You can take away their financial aid for college. But you can't stop the kids from getting high. Some people will try anything, and I don't think arresting them is going to help:

Information Bulletin
New Drug – JENKEM

On 09/19/07 Cpl. Disarro received and email from a concerned parent regarding a new drug called “Jenkem”. The parent advised their child learned about this drug through various conversations with several students at Palmetto Ridge High.

Jenkem originated in Africa and other third world countries by fermenting raw sewage to create a gas which is inhaled to achieve a high. Jenkem is now a popular drug in American Schools. Jenkem is a homemade substance which consists of fecal matter and urine. The fecal matter and urine are placed in a bottle or jar and covered most commonly with a balloon. The container is then placed in a sunny area for several hours or days until fermented. The contents of the container will separate and release a gas, which is captured in the balloon. Inhaling the gas is said to have a euphoric high similar to ingesting cocaine but with strong hallucinations of times past. [Snopes]

This doesn't sound like a good idea. But what shall we do about it? You can't pop people for poop possession, or piss-test people for piss sniffing. Should we launch a massive public education campaign warning kids that fermenting their excrement and breathing in the resulting fumes will get them wasted? That could backfire.

So I don't know what the solution is. For starters, we should wait to see if this is a real problem or just another hysterical response to a couple gross, though isolated, incidents. If there really is a rising trend of Florida youths sniffing fermented feces, maybe it's just an overreaction to the Miami DEA Chief's recent claim that marijuana will kill you.

A 12 year study from the university of Pittsburgh pokes yet another whole in the wet paper napkin known as the "gateway theory."

From NORML:

Investigators said that environmental factors (e.g., a greater exposure to illegal drugs in their neighborhoods) as well as subjects' "proneness to deviancy" were the two characteristics that most commonly predicted substance abuse.

"This evidence supports what's known as the common liability model ... [which] states [that] the likelihood that someone will transition to the use of illegal drugs is determined not by the preceding use of a particular drug, but instead by the user's individual tendencies and environmental circumstances," investigators stated in a press release. They added, "The emphasis on the drugs themselves, rather than other, more important factors that shape a person's behavior, has been detrimental to drug policy and prevention programs."

No kidding. It's such a perfectly logical conclusion, it's hard to understand why anyone thought otherwise. Especially since one study after another has shown the exact same thing.