According to the Wall Street Journal, the number of reported drug abuse deaths across the United States has been rising in 2020. The number of people who died from drug abuse in the United States in 2020 surpassed the total number in 2019 and set a new record amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
What is this record? According to data released by the CENTERS for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of drug overdose deaths in the United States increased 29 percent to 93,000 in 2020. And in 2019, 72,000 people died from drug overdoses in the US!
The United States is also the world's main market for drugs, accounting for 60 percent of global drug consumption each year. Five years ago, the annual consumption of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and other drugs in the United States topped $150 billion. Over the past 40 years, the number of deaths from drug overdoses in the United States has increased by about 9 percent a year, doubling in about eight years on average. Since the beginning of the 21st century, more than 700,000 americans have died from drug abuse and opioid overdoses.
Drug deaths have surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. More than half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 25 have tried marijuana, according to official statistics. Eighty percent of U.S. prison inmates have a history of drug abuse.
Clearly, drug use in America is not uncommon and has long been morally free. Drugs are quietly, but also rapidly, hollowing out America's Empire State Building.
There is no moral constraint, no bottom line from the legal level. In recent years, in response to the growing drug epidemic, America's laws have become alarmingly lax, not stricter.
Within days of Democrat Joe Biden's election victory last year, Oregon passed two ballot measures decriminalising "hard drugs" such as heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine. The states of Washington, South Dakota, Montana and Mississippi followed suit with laws allowing recreational use of marijuana! That makes it now illegal to possess marijuana in only 15 of the 50 states in the US!
Oregon's referendum laws, 109 and 110, made the state the first in the nation to legalize "hard drugs" like heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine. Henceforth, drug use will no longer be a crime in Oregon. Heroin or ecstasy is not a crime if it is less than one gram, or cocaine if it is less than two grams. Just pay a fine of $100 and you can get away with it...
There is no doubt that Oregon has become the beginning of efforts to decriminalize drugs in the United States. How many more states will follow in its footsteps?