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From turmoil in the Middle East to heightened tensions with Moscow to a laggard economy to a seemingly out-of-touch president, political, social, and cultural comparisons to 1979 are rife. Still, there is one more—and it is lethal: dangerous and illegal drug use and death.
For those who follow drug use trends, 1979 was known as the highwater mark of dangerous and illegal drug use, with 14.1 percent of our population regularly abusing drugs. To almost no headlines, we actually beat our 1979 apex of regular drug use in the data that came out this time last year. With the release of this year's National Survey on Drug Use and Health, we have beat our record again. We now have over 16 percent of Americans regularly using these poisons—and they are dying in record numbers. While we surpassed our 1979 use record by nearly 20 percent, we are seeing a greater than 3,000 percent increase of drug poisoning deaths.
And yet, despite these horrific milestones, you never hear about the fentanyl crisis, outside of an occasional story here and there on border policy debates.
It's not because America doesn't know how to highlight a public health crisis.
Recall how the AIDS crisis saturated our attention in the 1980s and 1990s. In the worst year of that tragedy—1995—50,000 Americans died, and we rightfully paid a huge amount of attention to it. High school and college students were fed a constant diet of warnings and information. News programs, theatrical plays, Hollywood, marches, fundraising walks, ribbons, and a national memorial quilt all deployed to educate on and give attention to the AIDS crisis.
Now, for perspective, consider that we lost 110,000 Americans to drug poisonings last year, an increase from 106,000 the year before. That's more than double the AIDS crisis at its height. We are losing more Americans to drug deaths than we ever did to AIDS, and it's not even close.
Or consider the COVID-19 pandemic: We shut down schools, we shut down after school programs, we enforced masking of children, we shamed. For COVID, we messaged everywhere to everyone, though the impact was mostly felt by our children.
Yet, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we lost about four times more children to drug poisonings than COVID, for which we upended childrens' and parents' lives wholesale.
Might we not ask for a semblance of prevention and public health messaging and attention as we have for lesser but more popular threats? Or, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, are the use of fashions in thought going to continue to distract the attention of our society from its real dangers, as if we need hoses when there is a flood?
There is good news in what can be done—if only we would adapt and adopt it. While many talk about the important reasons to seal our southern border, often discussing the flow of Fentanyl through it, that will not solve the entirety of the problem, as most Fentanyl flows through legal checkpoints. The drug problem in America is as much one of demand as it is supply, and Fentanyl is not our only problem. Meth and cocaine use is on the rise, and drug use of the animal tranquilizer Xylazine, or "Tranq," has become an entirely new problem as well.
What we must adopt is the policy that has worked in almost every area and every time it has been tried—including in our previous drug crises in the 1980s and 1990s: prevention.
Prevention worked to reduce drunk driving, it worked to reduce cigarette smoking, it worked to reduce forest fires, it worked to reduce littering, it worked to reduce car fatalities, and it worked to reduce drug use.
In fact, with massive public service campaigns like "This is Your Brain on Drugs" along with other prevention messaging from cultural, entertainment, and political leaders, we reduced drug use in this country by over 60 percent between 1979 and 1992.
The current drug crisis is killing Americans like never before and like nothing else. It is also driving an entire warp and whoof of other public policy problems from school shootings and other violent crimes to education deficits and dropouts to car crashes and fatalities to workplace accidents and absenteeism to interventions in departments of children and family services.
Given how we have treated other health crises in the past, given this crisis' far greater devastation—especially in our youth and young adult populations—and given all we have learned in how and how not to run public health campaigns, our drug problem deserves at least as much attention, if not more.
Seth Leibsohn is a co-founder of the Coalition for Youth Drug Abuse Prevention and a radio host on 960 Am in Phoenix, Arizona.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
