Serving All Your Heroin Needs

Here is a disheartening opinion piece in The New York Times:

Fatal heroin overdoses in America have almost tripled in three years. More than 8,250 people a year now die from heroin. At the same time, roughly double that number are dying from prescription opioid painkillers, which are molecularly similar. Heroin has become the fallback dope when an addict can’t afford, or find, pills. Total overdose deaths, most often from pills and heroin, now surpass traffic fatalities.

If these deaths are the measure, we are arguably in the middle of our worst drug plague ever, apart from cigarettes and alcohol.

And yet this is also our quietest drug plague. Strikingly little public violence accompanies it. This has muted public outrage. Meanwhile, the victims — mostly white, well-off and often young — are mourned in silence, because their parents are loath to talk publicly about how a cheerleader daughter hooked for dope, or their once-star athlete son overdosed in a fast-food restaurant bathroom.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/opinion/sunday/serving-all-your-heroin-needs.html

Terror and drugs are destroying an entire generation. Our "wars" on terror and drugs have been abject failures. How likely is it that the impetus for both was either created or tolerated by the powers that be for their own enrichment?