A New Study Adds to the Evidence That Drug Busts Result in More Overdose Deaths
Prohibition makes drug use more dangerous by creating a black market in which quality and potency are highly variable and unpredictable. Ramped-up enforcement of prohibition magnifies that problem, as dramatically demonstrated by the deadly impact of restricting access to pain medication at the same time that illicit fentanyl was proliferating as a heroin booster and substitute. That sort of perverse effect pervades drug law enforcement, as illustrated by a new study that found drug seizures in San Francisco were associated with a substantial increase in overdose risk.
The study included 2,653 drug seizures and 1,833 opioid-related deaths from 2020 to 2023. “Within the surrounding 100, 250, and 500 meters,” RTI International researcher Alex H. Kral and his two co-authors reported in JAMA Network Open on Wednesday, “drug seizures were associated with a statistically significant increase in the relative risk for fatal opioid overdoses.”
That is not the result that local authorities expected. “Since fentanyl entered the unregulated drug supply in San Francisco, California, around 2019, overdose mortality rates have reached record highs,” Kral et al. note. “This has sparked increased enforcement of drug laws.”
In December 2021, then-Mayor London Breed “declared a state of emergency in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco to enable ‘more coordinated enforcement and disruption of illegal activities.'” District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who took office in July 2022, “made combatting open-air drug markets and holding drug dealers accountable a top priority of her administration,” her office brags. In May 2023, Kral et al. note, Gov. Gavin Newsom “authorized the assignment of California Highway Patrol and California National Guard personnel to a new multiagency operation with the San Francisco Police Department aimed at ‘targeting fentanyl trafficking, disrupting the supply of the deadly drug in the city, and holding the operators of drug trafficking rings accountable.'”
How did all of that work out? The day after cops busted drug dealers, Kral et al. found, the risk of fatal overdoses rose by 74 percent, on average, within 100 meters. The increase in risk persisted for as long as a week, falling to 55 percent after two days, 45 percent after three days, and 27 percent after seven days. That pattern reinforces the conclusion that these police interventions, which aimed to reduce drug-related deaths, had the opposite effect.
Why
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