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Pain and Suffering in New England
Here in New England, it’s hard to get through a news cycle without at least one mention of the region’s opioid epidemic. Every media outlet covers it; governors are creating task forces faster than you can count; and the presidential candidates expect daily questions on the matter, often from parents who lost a child to an overdose. (Notably, Jeb Bush’s daughter has struggled with addiction for years, and Carly Fiorina’s stepdaughter died of an overdose.)
Is the problem worthy of the hype? More so than I had thought. In Massachusetts last year, there were nearly 1,100 confirmed deaths from opioid poisoning, and that number is likely to crawl higher as some investigations are completed. That’s up from 711 deaths in 2012, which constituted very nearly 30 percent of all accidental deaths in the state. Most depressingly, confirmed overdose deaths have increased every year since 2010, when the number was just 555. New Hampshire has only a fifth as many people as Massachusetts, but almost a third as many fatal cases. These rates are significantly higher than national averages.
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Despite all the pushback Pope Francis has been getting from free-marketeers, two important stipulations are in order: markets are not equally good at solving all problems, and many of their best features can be undermined by the greedy or immoral. They can work miracles like nothing else, but they’re also somewhat dependent on flawed human beings
This may instantly mark me as a hopelessly out-of-it person, but it’s something I didn’t know. From 
As Ricochet member ShellGamer 
Yesterday, Fred Cole 
Let me be very upfront here: I’m one of those radicals who thinks we should legalize all drugs. I’m not just in favor of marijuana legalization, but also the “hard stuff”: heroin, cocaine, LSD, and just about anything else you can think of. If you’re one of those weirdos who wants to put 
hristie’s aggressive stance against the legalization of marijuana in Thursday’s edition of The Daily Shot, I thought I’d share my experience with both illegal and legal drugs from the “backstage at the rock concert” perspective, based on two recent experiences. Mind you, I don’t take drugs, so my experience as an observer will have to do.
Continuing on today’s theme of prohibition, a common and very reasonable argument made by prohibitionists is to point to all the dangers, criminality, and immorality associated with proscribed activities and ask whether society should invite more of them. The implication is that these problems are intrinsic to the activity itself and should further tip the scales toward prohibition.
As marijuana legalization and decriminalization gains traction nationwide — 
My father was a cocaine addict who died of an overdose. He began using when I was about eight, and died when I was 24. He tried to quit a couple of times — twice he went into treatment centers — but he was not successful.
In his post “
When Washington State and Colorado voters legalized marijuana in 2012, many worried that the decision would lead to mayhem on the Evergreen and Centennial states’ roadways.
I lost an argument the other day. It wasn’t one of those arguments that you lose because you didn’t care or because you didn’t try. It wasn’t an argument that you lose for a lack of articulation or for an inability to make others see what you see. It was the sort of argument that you lose simply because the law wasn’t on your side. That’s a difficult loss to take, and trying to sleep that night, exhausted and alert, as if shouting as loud as I could in an attempt to locate silence, I knew it was a problem for which I would find a solution only years after the opportunity had passed. Immediately after the argument, I stepped out and took a little walk with my client, a 14 year old girl, just to get her away from all the commotion of the courtroom. We talked about a lot of things, and anticipating conflict ahead, I told her of the principle of charity, to interpret every word spoken in the best possible light, to grant what good she could find, and to always argue tactics over intentions; she smiled and thanked me for helping her to get away from everyone.
