Not an imminent danger?
While this is true, you cannot ignore the fact that up to 100,000 people die in the US per year from over doses. (evidently in 2025, this number has fallen)
Plus some additional information below wrt to other impacts due to the availability of drugs.
Irrespective of the governments process, and there are two (or more) sides to most arguments, if you suspected that if a boat was carrying a nuclear bomb at 13 miles (just inside international
waters, that it would be best to mitigate the threat?
AI's take on this
Key Statistics on Drug-Related Harms
- Substance Use Disorders (SUDs): In 2024, an estimated 48.4 million Americans aged 12 or older met the diagnostic criteria for a substance use disorder. This includes 28.2 million people with a drug use disorder and 27.9 million with an alcohol use disorder (some individuals suffer from both).
- Drug Overdose Deaths: There were approximately 105,000 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2023. The majority of these deaths (around 76%) involved an opioid, particularly illegally manufactured fentanyl.
- Emergency Department Visits and Hospitalizations: Adverse drug events (ADEs), which include medication errors, side effects, and unintentional overdoses, result in more than 1.5 million emergency department visits and around 500,000 hospitalizations annually.
- Co-occurring Conditions: The impact is often compounded by mental health issues; approximately 21.2 million adults in 2024 had both a mental health disorder and an SUD.
Add on to this the impact on those people who are related to these people above.
There is certainly not an easy solution to these problems
