Meanwhile, an undemocratic economy is an addiction-inducing disease that SHOULD be treated like a criminal activity.

Our 1%-centric economy kills poor and working class people, among other things by driving them to self-medicate in dangerous ways. The economic phenomena related to addiction not only include denial of treatment to those who need it but also the other end of the addiction process relating to why people use.

Racially, there is an equal opportunity epidemic of drug abuse. However, the confluence of the epidemic with rising U.S. white working class morbidity is striking. As the now famous Princeton study from last fall noted:

Although death rates related to drugs, alcohol and suicides have risen for middle-aged whites at all education levels, the largest increases are seen among those with the least education, the researchers found. For those with a high school degree or less, deaths caused by drug and alcohol poisoning rose fourfold; suicides rose by 81 percent; and deaths caused by liver disease and cirrhosis rose by 50 percent.

(http://wws.princeton.edu/faculty-research/research/item/rising-morbidity... see also a comparison of U.S. and European drug use: http://recoverybrands.com/drugs-in-america-vs-europe/)

I'm going to be somewhat heroin-focused in this story for personal reasons, but having seen desperate addicts who huff common households products or steal OTC cough medicine, I think it is best not to focus on a particular drug in analyzing the economic foundation of U.S. drug addiction. I'm also going to be anecdotal and personal. If you are looking for a scholarly article or a geometric proof this is not it, but I think I am writing validly both from the heart and the mind.

Just so you know my vantage point: A monument to my extended family over the last forty plus years would be like a mini-Vietnam War Memorial of drug deaths, particularly wasteful because the war on drugs, like the Vietnam War, never should have been fought. But my sister’s one of the lucky ones not up on the wall. Eight years clean and sober from heroin and counting. She credits the expensive high quality 28-day drug treatment my brother and I were able to purchase for her, followed by our helping to pay for a year at a good half-way house far from her old town and friends and with structured work opportunities and daily "working the program,” followed by gradually more free living conditions and improving work opportunities, and still more daily “working the program."

As much as I am thankful for my sister recovering her precious life, as a democratic socialist I'm less interested in celebrating our private good fortune and more interested in the public role in prevention and treatment. And because I believe I am seeing mass economic-related PTSD in the lives of the destitute people with whom I work in the Deep South, and that this leads many to self-medicate in a dangerous way, I think not only about getting rid of the drug war and replacing it with treatment and recovery programs but also about making America work economically for all as a matter of prevention as well as overall justice.

To me, having a nation of liberty and justice for all is a moral imperative, not a mere slogan in a nationalistic pledge. And we won't have that nation without democratic control of our economy, which in turn will not be likely to come in my lifetime (I’m 56) without the political revolution Bernie is talking about.

I saw a piece yesterday evening about heroin addiction in Binghampton, NY (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/11/heroin-addiction-epidemic...), and it reminded me that the epidemic is nationwide and, although it is a health problem that should not be treated as a legal problem, it also is an economic problem that should be faced head on as such.

“We are in the greatest public health crisis in this county’s history and we can’t find the money to spend on it? We don’t spend the money because we still think it is not a disease, but a personal failing.”

Dig deeper and a question arises: why an epidemic now? Why in quiet towns such as Binghamton? You get a similar answer from almost everyone: boredom, hopelessness and availability. “I ask people, why heroin here, why now?”, Garnar says. “They all give me the same answer, ‘there is literally nothing to do here.’ There are not enough good paying jobs.”

The statistics say Binghamton’s unemployment and wages are just slightly below the national average. Yet relative to the past, things seem far worse. In the last 60 years the city has lost half of its population and many of the best jobs. IBM and GE, once central to the town, have fled. This is not unique to Binghamton. Everyplace where drugs are entering, hope has been exiting.

There are plenty of heroin users from rich families in America, although many of those users grow up facing highly stressful and alienating conditions with an affluent face.

Nor is the heroin epidemic something that just started. Earlier in the day, I happened to read a story from last fall about a middle-aged addict who’s been living on the streets of the Bronx for decades. (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/28/my-heroin-addict-friend-w...)

Shelly was born Michael in a small upstate New York town. She was molested as a child, and when she told her parents “they blamed me, saying if you weren’t gay it wouldn’t have happened”.

Harassed for her desire to become a woman, she ran away at 15. “When I started with drugs and then working the streets, I just wanted attention. I didn’t get it where I should have, at home, but the johns gave it to me.”

In the Bronx, Shelly joined a community of street addicts who accepted and understood her, most of them having also escaped trauma. Most are women fleeing sexual abuse by relatives. On the streets they turn to drugs to forget, and then prostitution to pay for the drugs. They split their time between various makeshift homes and government institutions, living under bridges, abandoned houses, scammed apartments, jails or rehab centers.

I also read a diary-style piece about a Canadian-born family member angered by the arbitrary limitations on treatment in the U.S. (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/10/my-uncle-and-heroin)

July 2013. My eye lands on a headline in the New York Times: “Heroin in New England, More Abundant and Deadly.” I can’t recall the last time I saw heroin in the news. Media coverage of drug use had shifted, or so it seemed to me, to meth.

...

I stop when I read: “Maine is the first state that has limited access to specific medications, including buprenorphine and methadone.” I open a new tab, search for what the writers mean by the vague phrase, “has limited access to”. Earlier that year, the state enacted legislation to limit how long recovering addicts could stay on methadone, or similar drug-replacement therapies, before they had to start paying out of pocket. Medicaid patients will receive coverage for a maximum of two years. I know that for some people, like you, this is not enough time.

Moving to the United States from Canada was, for me, eight years earlier, an easy enough transition. Much is shared between the two countries, and the culture shock was minimal. Yet even after all this time, I still find that certain ideas I’d taken for granted throughout adolescence and early adulthood – ideas about what a good society tries to make available for its citizens – are here not to be taken for granted at all.

People come to the revolution for multiple important reasons, from concern about overwhelming debt and lost jobs to the belief that health care should be a realized right to awareness that climate change is going to make our planet unlivable for many if not all. Persons of color, women, LGBTs, and undocumented residents face even greater barriers to liberty and justice for all than the hapless "white working class" that stood out in the Princeton study. Much of this suffering by our brothers and sisters relates to the fact that our nation and our world are in one degree or another of crisis for most of the people even when not in what is labeled a recession in the U.S.

The gorilla in the room is the undemocratic system that creates the crises, not the coping mechanisms people employ to get through the pain.

I stand in solidarity with the human race and our planet. As a species-being doing my best, I welcome your good faith critique. But I believe that the rampant drug abuse we are encountering in the U.S., which has killed and is killing so many in my own extended family but not, knock on wood, my sister thank goodness, is yet another major horrible effect of an undemocratic economy.

The pain-inducing austerity-driven progressive tax-cutting mindset that accompanies neoliberal triumphalism directly or indirectly leads someone we love to literally take dangerous "medicine.” This allows the user to deal with the stress resulting from the 1% maintaining their greedy democracy-crushing status quo.

No more. Bring on the revolution.

Bernie supports a sensible drug strategy that treats addiction as a disease not a criminal activity. (http://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-drug-policy/) But equally if not more importantly, he realizes we need to create a nation of much greater economic justice. I believe that in such a nation, usage of dangerous drugs would be less of a coping mechanism because there would be substantially less economic duress with which to cope.