Opioids. Its strictly business

Be warned small town America.

Big city drug dealers of opioids and other drugs have their eye on you.

“It’s not personal,” as Michael Corleone of the Godfather family might put it. “It’s strictly business.”

He’s got a point. It’s a good marketing strategy for drug dealers and with lower risk. These days, local police are having to track dealers all over the map often with no success.

The fact is, we can no more shut down drug dealers than we could shut down the bootleggers of the 20’s. What we can do is help citizens in individual communities choose to recover and fight back with both local and national support.

Over the past year we, at One Day at a Time (ODAT), a ten year old non-profit operation, have been developing a plan to form a Little Rock citizen’s “roundtable” to help local citizens get well. We hope other communities will follow our lead.

To use a war analogy, results show that we can’t win with federal “carpet bombing.” We have to dig it out with Normandy beach and Iwo Jima style invasions.

In a recent front-page article of the Wall Street Journal, the paper reported on the opioid problem, one of many articles on the subject over the past year.

“The big city dealers, who bring fentanyl-laced heroin to the upper Midwest,” the Journal article said, “drop in and out of town and often recruit local addicts to help them hide or sell drugs, making them tougher to catch.

“In the twin cities of Superior, Wisconsin and Duluth, Minnesota the drug business is seriously taxing law enforcement whose members end up chasing suppliers all over the map with not much success.”

Another plus for the dealers is that smaller community customers more often have the means to pay, and there is less violence. The return on investment is also greater. A gram of heroin that sells for $50 to $100 in Chicago fetches up to $200 in Northern Wisconsin or Minnesota. More customers have the means to pay and there’s less of the big city violence.

The centers for disease control and prevention has warned about the growing risk of overdose and death from the widening array of toxic fentanyl-related compounds (which are in the opioid family) that are being mixed with heroin or sold as heroin.

In one example, the Journal article pointed to “a recent spate of overdose deaths in Ohio tied to carfentanyl, a chemical cousin of fentanyl used to tranquilize elephants and other large mammals.”

In some cases, dealers or addicts are ordering fentanyl or chemically similar drugs on line, directly from suppliers in China, which the DEA says produces much of the world’s synthetic opioid supply.

Chinese suppliers are also sending large quantities of fentanyl or its chemical ingredients to Mexico, where cartels mix the drug with heroin and smuggle it to U.S. cities.

Its not likely that the Chinese, or any other suppliers, will see the error of their ways and stop exporting drugs. So instead, we should expand our efforts to help citizens in our individual communities fight back against their addictions. Only then can they become the family oriented and productive citizens we hope that they will become.

Like our World War II successes, our plan is likely to be slow going at first, but as individual communities are able to fight back, we’ve got a shot.

With regard to building a wall on our southern border to help keep drugs out of America, we believe it can help some, but with its focus on curtailing supply, success is likely to be limited and probably not cost effective. The best investment, we feel, is in helping individual communities organize and promote recovery.

The Little Rock Round table, evoking, as it does, positive feelings of compassion, steadfastness, courage, honor, chivalry and nobility will seek to focus on the recovery of every individual who seeks help. In our approach, we have been inspired by the 12^th century round table, which, history tells us, had 12 members. We are aiming for eight to ten.

Community assets and focus

            Our mission, ultimately, is to eliminate drug abuse in every community in America, but we begin with Little Rock/ North Little Rock and will take it one community at a time and one day at a time. We hope other communities will begin to develop their own versions of our approach.

         Little Rock/North Little Rock has excellent hospitals (dealing with both mental health and addictions), community-focused and entrepreneurial churches, traditional 12 step programs, responsive local governments and a history of proactively dealing with addictions dating back to 1940.

The plan is focused on:

1. Reducing the demand for alcohol and other drugs by promoting recovery while maintaining adequate law enforcement protection to limit the supply.
2. Forming collaborations with other organizations with complementary objectives.
3. Promoting healthy lifestyles in spirit, mind and body.
4. Encouraging the interest and support of local government.

Short Term Goals

1. Position One Day at a Time as a valuable non-profit resource on substance abuse and recovery and a model for other communities both inside and outside the state.
2. Provide educational, cultural and life-changing initiatives for addicts, those on the path to recovery, families and friends of substance abusers, healthcare professionals and businesses.
3. Work with legislators and begin to identify priority issues for an ODAT legislative agenda.
4. Expand our website to offer more resources including listings of treatment and transition facilities, churches, employment opportunities, 12 Step meetings, books, education and employment opportunities and commentaries.
5. Create a speakers bureau, which would include inmates, teenagers, healthcare professionals, veterans and other in recovery.
6. Develop further our presence on Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in and possibly other social media.
7. Increase revenue through tax-deductible contributions, advertising, speaker fees, special events (some collaborative), book sales and others.
8. Identify grant opportunities, create a grant calendar and begin developing proposals.
9. Create and implement annual activities for our prison, adolescent/college and veteran prison inmates. We have a good track record since our founding in mid 2004 and through God’s grace we will do our best to make a difference.

Funding

We seek funding with seven sources of revenue in mind: Donors, Hospitals, addiction treatment facilities, grants, web and social media advertising and promotion, special events, support from local government and book publishing

The Need

“On any given day,” Joseph Califano writes in his book, High Society, “100 million Americans (one third of the population) are taking some stimulant, antidepressant, tranquilizer, or painkiller; smoking; inhaling from aerosol cans or glue bottles; or self medicating with alcohol or illegal substances like marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, hallucinogens, Ecstasy, and other designer drugs.”