numerous times a day, that people are okay. nues a dayand, you know, it s se we have the addicts down there that are using their suffering. they re sort of destroying themselves, is destroying that ary. te have t but there s a whole generation and a whole community of people that live in that area that are being held hostages insideunity. their homes. they can t even come outsi on their doorstep. children can t go to the parksd the and play. you know, it s like nothing i ve ever seen. en. it s being tolerated and it s almost being endorsed and encouraged to go down theren and do what you want to do. can you get yourself ofd hatr these drugs or not? ow with so right now, with the with the mix of fentanyl and tranfentanya you do have to be medicalllly detoxed and a lot of places don t really know how to attack it becausethere is there s no sw before when it was heroin. we knew how to attack that. we knew what we needed to what medicines we had to administer for the withdrawal symptoms.
solving the fentanyl crisis in america will take time and a wide range of efforts and doctors still prescribe far too many opioids, responding the commercial incentives and a 2019 study shows that american and canadian, post-operative patients were seven times more likely to be prescribed opioids than patients in sweden. drug treatment and rehabilitation programs are still far too small and underfunded. medications that help with withdrawal symptoms have proven extremely effective, but still only one in four people who need them in the u.s. can obtain them. in the meantime, though, it is much easier to bellow about going to war with mexico. let s hope that this is just campaign craziness. if we actually try to make these threats a reality, we will be asking for decades of turmoil. go to cnn.dom/fareed for a link to my washington post column