It never ends, does it?

Drug abuse, much of it from prescription medication, now kills more Americans each year than homicide or car accidents. It has become the fastest-growing cause of accidental death in the U.S.

To put the magnitude of the issue in perspective, the death wave from drug abuse is now as big, in terms of annual deaths, as the one caused by HIV-AIDS in the late 1980s. That resulted in a national public-health response. And yet policy makers have been largely silent about prescription drugs.

Wait -- you mean gun crime isn't the leading reason to put a boot on the neck of Americans?  Now it's prescription drugs?

How about medical errors? 

Preventable medical errors and infections kill 200,000 people a year in the United States, which is roughly a 1-in-1,650 chance per year -- roughly 60 per 100,000 or five times the rate claimed for prescription drugs and more than 12 times the rate as a whole for homicide, including gun homicide.

That is, it's 60 times more likely that you will be killed by a hospital or other medical facility due to a preventable error than it is that you will be murdered by any design (whether with a firearm or a golf club.)  And it's 5 times more likely that you will be killed by such an error than you will die due to prescription drug abuse.

But when we talk about prescription drug deaths in the context that the author of this piece is we're not talking about aggression by either intentional act or culpable negligence ("preventable error") -- we're talking about intentional acts undertaken by (nearly always) adults that result in their own personal demise.

In the case of both homicide and medical error, however, someone has aggression directed at them without their consent. If you want to make a difference in society then go after those who aggress against others -- not those who choose to take an action that has a negative personal result.

Evan seems to think that the solution to this problem lies in more laws and more cops -- in short, more intrusions into people's lives.  But what Evan doesn't accept is that we're all individuals who have dominion over our own lives and person.  That is, you have a right to drink yourself to death, even though it may be regrettable. 

The author also tries to make the argument that there is no "meaningful" substitution behavior.  But all Evan cites is a correlation -- there's no evidence presented of causation, and the two are not equivalent.

The "war on drugs" has been an abject failure.  Not only has it failed to stop the abuse of drugs it has provided hundreds of billions of dollars of illicit profit for criminal gangs over the years and the banksters involved.  This in turn has been funneled into weapons and has driven the homicide rate higher. 

And unlike someone who decides to drink themselves to death, or use pills until they die, homicide is a different matter as it involves non-consensual harm to others.

At its core the problem with these folks is that they refuse to accept that you are a sovereign individual and that you, and nobody but you, has the right to determine your destiny -- for good or bad.  It is this refusal that leads to all manner of interference and by decoupling action from consequence the black hole of government spending opens up and swallows everyone in its path, creating felons by the score without ever managing to actually "win" any of these alleged "wars."

There is only one way to put a stop to this downward spiral, and that is to admit that each person is a sovereign individual and has the right to make decisions for themselves -- and in doing so they must live with the consequences, whether those consequences are good or bad.

Yes, there will be those who make bad choices and will suffer the consequences.  But this does not rise to the level of criminal conduct, no matter how much Evan -- and many others -- would like to make it so.