Have you noticed how differently the current opioid epidemic is being handled compared to the crack cocaine epidemic a few years ago?

No calls of “lock ‘em up”, “Three strikes and you’re out”, “Throw away the key”, “Mandatory Sentencing”, “Zero Tolerance”. Now the talk is all about “treatment” and “programs”. “Its a disease”, “A National Emergency”.

I don’t mean to be flippant about this. I’m well aware what a devastating human tragedy this is, and was then–and still is–the crack epidemic never went away. In both cases, you have disadvantaged, devastated communities fallen on hard times falling into drug abuse, leading to social disintegration, the deterioration of families and communities, the rise of crime as addicts desperately try to raise the money they need to support their habits, and organized crime mobilizes to meet the lucrative demand. And in both cases, the social decay and substance abuse feed on each other in a vicious circle until it is impossible to tell the difference between cause and effect. And then come the deaths, a scourge decimating the middle and working class towns of the Rustbelt and Middle America. Trump Country.

But this time it is not black ghetto youth swamped by unemployment and poverty, it is white working class families, and their children, succumbing to…well, the same thing, really.

Of course, cocaine wasn’t just about crack. The yuppies and hipsters snorted the dust, the blacks smoked the rock, and along the fringes came the heroin, the exotics and party drugs and we remember how the laws were adjusted to zero in on their targets. In Anytown USA it was meth from clandestine laboratories, and now synthetic pain killers, gleefully pumped out by an unholy alliance of drug companies, doctors, pharmacies and their entrepreneurial allies on Main Street.

Meanwhile, our Attorney General seems determined to wage war on legal marijuana.