Attorney General Jeff Sessions accuses some people in politics and the media with sending mixed messages on drugs. In an address delivered in Green Bay, the attorney general said some politicians, and some in the media and Hollywood have sent “accommodating messages” about drug use.
“Accommodation to a rattlesnake in your bed is not a good thing, I would submit,” Sessions told the National Alliance for Drug Endangered Children, meeting at the K-I Center.
Sessions called for creating and fostering “a culture that’s hostile to drug use,” adding that “changing from acquiescing to rejection, socially, medically and morally to drug abuse, can be done and must be done.”
Noting the detestation that opioid abuse has brought to Wisconsin and his own state of South Carolina, Sessions said that efforts to prevent people from abusing drugs in the first place may be more effective that treatment once they’re already addicted.
“Treatment is critically important,” Sessions said. “In some cases, treatment helps break the cycle of addiction and crime and gets people on their feet, and out of the clutches of drugs. But treatment cannot be our only policy. Treatment often comes too late.”
Sessions said that based on preliminary data, nearly 60,000 Americans lost their lives to drug overdoses in 2016. “That will be the highest drug death toll and the fastest increase in that death toll in American history. This is not a sustainable trend nor an acceptable America.”