Chuck Schumer's $100 Million Cure for the Heroin 'Epidemic' Is Snake Oil
Last week Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) requested $100 million to fight the heroin "epidemic" by going after traffickers in New York. In my latest Forbes column, I argue that Schumer's description of the problem is misleading and that his solution is bound to fail. Here is how the column starts:
Last week Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked for "an emergency $100 million surge" in federal funding to "to quickly combat the fact that New York City has become the hotbed for the East Coast heroin trade." Schumer declared that "heroin trafficking and usage are at epidemic levels," adding that "seizures of heroin in New York City in 2014 have already surpassed those of any previous year since 1991, which demonstrates an alarming trend that we must nip in the bud."
Depending on how you define epidemic, you may or may not agree with Schumer's description of the problem. But it is abundantly clear from a century of efforts to suppress the heroin trade that his solution—more spending on supply-side measures such as seizing heroin and prosecuting heroin dealers—is doomed to fail.
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It’s also snake oil to not have alt-text. And first!
Chuck knows that that his power rests on keeping everyone at the, uh, government’s teat. His part of the drug war gravy train is things like this.
I see what you did there.
$100 million to combat the scourge of moobs!
I wonder if he goes topless on the beach. One law for him and another law for the non-penised.
The thought of a topless Chunky Chucky made my brain shrink.
Shrinkage?
I could easily live the rest of my life without seeing another picture of Schumer, Reich, or Krugman.
By the way, does anyone know a website that compares the net worth of Senators/Congressmen before they’re elected to what they’re worth now? I’ve tried looking but didn’t have much success. Not sure what made me think of that right now. *rolls eyes and whistles*
There’s opensecrets.org, not sure if that’s includes pre-insider wealth though.
That sounded rather sarcastic, “Libertarian”.
/Fed
They made that Denzel Washington movie a few years ago about the black heroin dealer in Harlem. That was based on a real person and took place in the 70s. There is this little movie Chuck might have heard of called the Godfather that is partially set around the real life conflict the post war New York Mafia faced regarding the issue of whether to let their people get into the heroin trade.
Only someone as stupid as Chuck Schumer could think that New York has “become the hotbed for the East Coast heroin trade”. How does Chuck manage to feed himself?
It’s not that CS is stupid, it’s that he thinks everyone else is stupid. He has nothing but contempt for absolutely everyone, except those he can toady to increase his personal wealth and/or increase his influence. No matter how cynical one is about a creature like Chuck Schumer, one cannot be cynical enough.
That being said, I would like to see if he *could* feed himself without wearing a bib. Although that might put me off food forever.
Yeah, He is so arrogant and thinks everyone is so beneath him that he actually thinks people will believe that bullshit.
he actually thinks people will believe that bullshit.
And he’s RIGHT. See “Chuck Schumer Re-elected for Umpteenth Time”
Last week Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked for “an emergency $100 million surge” in federal funding to “to quickly combat the fact that New York City has become the hotbed for the East Coast heroin trade.”
Up yours, Baltimore!
I think “up yours, Baltimore!” goes without saying.
Fuck you, Baltimore!
Chuckie’s pic is exactly what you find in the dictionary when looking up mendacious. That his name is associated with failure based on other people’s money pretty well defines him, Jacob.
Actually I was thinking of using Chuck’s pic for my dick pick submission to Jessie and Nickki to see what camp I was put in.
I fear that even though my pic would easily be the biggest dick submitted, it would instantly lead me to being put in the unfuckable camp.
I am nervous about the idea of legalizing hard drugs, but as I hear about drug-war abuses, I’m developing some sympathy with the idea of letting adults put stuff into their bodies, subject to the right of their families to obtain guardianship over them if their addiction messes them up too much.
I used to be in the “legalize pot but not the real serious stuff” camp. I am not there anymore. What convinced me more than anything was the experiences of the criminal defense attorneys I know and the writings of that English prison doctor who writes under the pseudonym Theodore Dahlrymple.
I don’t think there is any such thing as “addiction”. What there is is irresponsible people who use drugs in irresponsible ways. If you took the drugs away, they would be just as irresponsible and self destructive, they would just do it in other ways. So there is no point in worrying about the drugs.
I think there are such persons as addicts, but there’s an element of free will.
As some joker once put it, we have to believe in free will, we have no choice.
Because when we legislate from the opposite assumption – that people are robots – then we get all sorts of weird results.
The addict is the person who has to decide to get better and put in the work, not some drug court authoritarian.
Yes. No amount of rehab or jail is going to change an addict. They have to want to decide to change themselves. That is a hard thing for people to accept about a loved one. So the families of addicts are often the quickest to believe in the “drugs make people addicts” bullshit because it allows them to avoid the awful truth about their loved one.
Yes. The “addiction” such as it is is just one way of describing a person’s self destructive and obsessive behavior.
The idea that drugs are addictive, implies that people who are otherwise not self destructive or obsessive could become so by taking the drug. And experience says that is just nonsense. Millions of people have tried and even used the most allegedly addictive drugs and never become addicts. They either used them once and stopped or eventually just decided it wasn’t worth doing anymore. They were responsible people to start with and the drugs didn’t make them otherwise.
The “addicts” in contrast are irresponsible people to begin with and just use the drugs as a way to be that way. The drugs are incidental.
Who was the dickhole who was advocating “soft” prohibition the other day? The one who was totally against the drug war, but thought that people should lose their rights as soon as they tried any drugs because “addicts?”
I missed that but whoever said it is a moron.
I don’t know if you were in that thread, but it was a troll I was unfamiliar with, but others seemed to know. He was obsessed with the way Europe does things, and thought that was completely different than the drug war for some reason.
Usually, those who advocate prohibition while claiming it’s shortcomings, tend to be concern-trolls.
The way I put it is that there are people who have addictive personalities. Meaning, they are going to exhibit addictive behavior no matter what. The only question is: what are they going to be addicted to?
These people are not going to stop being addictive personalities/addicted to something. If what they latch onto happens to be illegal, so be it.
These are the people who wreck their lives and thus provide one of the two major justifications* for the WOD. And the WOD just won’t make any difference to them.
*The other major justification is the violence associated with the black market, which is itself a creation of the WOD.
Dalrymple is not really in favor of drug legalization: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUiymTG2v9s
He might not be. I don’t know. But his views on addiction and the addicts he worked with convinced me to be in favor of it. I guess he reached a different conclusion.
Wait, I scrolled through to him, and the moderator seemed to say his real name is *Anthony Daniels.* Is this right?
Yes, his real name is Anthony Daniels, but he’s not that Anthony Daniels
the idea of letting adults put stuff into their bodies,
think about that for a second. How do you believe in liberty but oppose that action?
I said I’m sympathetic to the idea.
With the proviso that if drugs (or anything else) sufficiently messes up a person’s life the family can put him under guardianship (which I think is allowed now) and giving hard drugs to a person under guardianship would be treated like giving hard drugs to children.
I believe you are concerned with the addicts well being, but if you allow family members to take away an adult’s rights based on drug use, why not other poor life choices? Bad with money? Lose control of your finances. It is a hard fact to accept not everyone is going to make the best choices, but that is liberty.
I believe it takes more than that to establish guardianship.
However, not being an expert, I defer to those who are.
Drug use entails a lot of social costs when you’re criminalizing it. Not everyone immediately recognizes the connection, and assume that liberalizing drug use would entail more rather than fewer problems.
This.^
This is what the debate comes down to, huh? Harms under prohibition vs harms of legalization. Most prohibitionists scoff at the social costs of their policies stating it’s either isolated (police brutality canine kill-fest), or the user’s fault in partaking of a consensual activity. It’s all collateral damage to these statists.
Remember, Paul, that toddler burned into a coma by an incendiary whilst sleeping in her crib wasn’t the victim of some overzealous SWAT cop, and by extension, overly aggressive prohibitionism. No, that poor child was the victim of the meth dealer those cops were targetting, the one who wasn’t even present during the bust. He’s the terrorist.
I am nervous about the idea of continuing prohibition for one second longer. The government keeps growing, the abuses keep getting more common, and rights keep getting pushed further into the background.
They’re also shooting up Four Loko, or so I have heard.
Nobody’s that crazy.
Better than having to taste it.
Isn’t some of the heroin problem we’re having because we cracked down on prescription opioids, making them harder to get than heroin?
And I’m sure the answer to heroin is to crack down on it more. So where do addicts turn next?
Yes it is. People who used to pop pills are now thanks to the DEA buying heroin off the street. Meanwhile, people who need the pills for pain can’t get them in many cases. We are making sick people suffer so that degenerates are forced to buy from the dealers rather than just get a script from a sympathetic Dr. Isn’t that just great?
Making other people suffer is its own reward to people like Schumer, John.
But he means well Episiarch and he is sure that their suffering is for their own good.
I believe very strongly in the ability of assholes to convince themselves that their destruction is for the greater good, but Schumer might just be fucking evil. There is nothing behind those eyes.
I don’t think he means well.
I know it’s petty of me, but it makes me hope there really is a God, and He gives people like that metastatic stomach cancer, and then they have to suffer through the effects of their own goddamn laws.
Does Reason publish many pieces advocating the legalization of hard drugs?
(I don’t visit often enough to tell)
Not enough. Every murdered dog, every mutilated child, every life ruined by prohibition is its own reason to legalize drugs. For the children, the adults, the animals, the environment, and the cause of liberty.
So is heroin the new big thing again? When I was back in Cleveland I saw tons of billboards trying to scare people with ridiculous statistics about how much its usage has gone up in the past few years.
Every day, 500 million Americans die from heroin overdoses. That’s up 30% from last month. Not even once!
They told me back in the 1980s that current trends meant that everyone in America would be addicted to heroin by 2010. And now Chuck shows me they were right.
“By (far enough in the future that I assume no one will remember this prediction), the thing I am against will be everybody’s problem if you don’t give me money/authority/attention” was a popular line of bullshit back then.
There’s one on 117th and Madison that says something like, “Know someone who’s thinking about using heroin? We can help.” Every time I go by, I want to call the number and ask them to help me get some heroin.
That is awesome. You should totally do that.
“So, I really want to try heroin but don’t know how. I don’t want to get ripped off and I want to make sure I get the good stuff but not too good of stuff that will make me the next Janis Joplin. I saw your sign. You guys can hook me up right?”
You haven’t called yet? Why do you hate the heroin helpers, Warty? You’re a monster!
I SAW THAT ONE!
Plus ca change. When I went off to college in 1997, MTV was running a documentary following kids in Plano, TX who were from upper-middle class white families. Had a friend who I met later that year who was doing something like five years of probation with adjudication deferred because he had secured a hotel room for an underaged friend who OD’d and died. IIRC, he worked the desk at the hotel, and the other people using told him about the OD as they fled. “Congratulations on being a standup guy. Here’s a felony rap.” Because he called 911 and his parents could afford a lawyer he got a decent deal. But he still walked free at the whim of a PO. I guess his wasn’t a dick.
Nah. The cop was a dick. Otherwise he would never have been an arrest or charge to get such a sweet deal on.
My father was a probation officer and he always said all drugs are cyclical.
According to him, younger siblings saw how drug x fucked up their older siblings and avoided it and did the new more “sensible” drugs.
He was one of the few people who said not to worry about the meth “epidemic” because it would fizzle after a few years and something new would take its place.
I guess it is heroin.
Chuck Schumer is a very useful person in terms of political thought.
If I haven’t got the time to research an issue properly, I can find out what Chuck Schumer’s position is and go the other way.
(By the way, the guy who took that picture should know better than to get that close to a horse’s ass.)
“Last week Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked for “an emergency $100 million surge”
“The $100bn I injected over the last 30 years is wearing out… my skin is…itching… cold sweats… just $100m…. to tide me over, man… i swear, *I’ll suck your fucking dick*… just a few hundred million man, and i swear, we’ll start cutting back on the Drug War… its just… an election coming man, and police unions, they’re on my back, you dig? How am i supposed to Kick *now*?”
Shorter Schmucky: “I’m gonna kick….tomorrow!”
LOL
The voters of NYC continue to overwhelmingly re-elect a banal authoritarian. NYC voters are stupid and deserve what they get which is a heroin epidemic, high taxes, and concomitant loss of liberties. Fuck them.
Nice collective guilting, asshole.
1) Chuckles is a state senator, so you’ll need to expand your collectivizing to all of NYS.
2) I guess all the people that didn’t vote for him can go fuck themselves too.
3) Who are your senators? Are they assholes too? Because if so, you are 100% at fucking fault by your own logic. Fuck you.
Who are your senators? Are they assholes too?
This number approaches 100%….there are a few whom I wouldn’t put in front of a firing squad.
A….few.
Does any state have two decent senators? I can think of a few with one, but not both.
Raston, the problem with (some) voters getting the government they deserve is that the rest of us also get the government they deserve.
Now, when some Obamabot cries about how they got screwed by ObamaCare, I laugh at them, because in that case, that person is getting exactly what they deserve. The rest of us, not so much.
To be fair on 1), I imagine that if every single person outside the city limits voted for Chuckles’ opponent, he’d still win every re-election in a landslide.
That guy’s a SENATOR?! christ, i thought he was some low level state representative. my bad.
My senators have the good grace to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.
Unfortunately, Bitchtits wasn’t happy just fucking over New York, so he is the whole country’s problem. He is spending our money and destroying our liberty.
Also, rumor has it that Bitchtits likes…company…of the…sheep variety.
“Chuck Schumer’s $100 Million Cure for the Heroin ‘Epidemic’ Is Snake Oil”
Chuck Schumer is Snake Oil. FTFY
What all you idiots, commenting above, don’t understand is that a popular white actor, by the name of Philip Seymour Hoffman, overdosed on heroin. THAT IS WHY IT IS NOW A PRESSING PROBLEM WHICH THREATENS THE VERY FOUNDATION OF THIS COUNTRY!!!!!!
At least no one is proposing to ban medical morphine.