Ferri Tales

" Chasing The Dragon " (s creened at the Keystone theater, Towanda, PA in early June) is an anti-drug documentary produced through the office of the FBI director James Comey. It shows, in vivid detail, the tragedies of seven families resulting from addictions to opioid drugs, typically initiated by prescription OxyContin , and escalating to other opioids, usually heroin. Most of the victims are teens and young adults; two appear to be in their thirties or early forties. Two of the young adults died from overdoses. One died a few days after spending 7 months in rehab. I deliberately referred to the subjects of this deeply flawed documentary as victims because that is exactly what they are--victims of our failed multi-decade, trillion dollar (and counting)  War on Drugs . The War on Drugs has not only failed , it has exacerbated the problem. Our problems with addictive substances would be far less if the War had never existed. The message of the documentary see...

(I live in Towanda, PA--a small town in Bradford County in the northeast part of the state.   According to the CDC , in 2014 Pennsylvania was ranked 8th in the U.S. for overdose deaths at 219 deaths per million age adjusted population.  West Virginia is # 1 at 355 per million, and the lowest is North Dakota at 63 per million. The U.S. average in 2014 was 147 deaths per million . I wrote the item below because of the local response to 3 overdose deaths in 3 days in mid-February, 2016. On May 5, 2016, an Addiction Awareness Rally was held in front of the Bradford County courthouse where local residents spoke about friends and family members with drug addictions, with truly heartrending accounts of the deaths of loved ones to addictions. It is tragically ironic that the backdrop for the speeches was the courthouse with the following words at the top of the building: Justice, Law, Mercy. As presented below, the War on Drugs has provided none of these.) The Uni...