| Restaurant workers Vadim Birca and Dimitrije Gudobski left a Christmas Eve celebration to party on their own along the Galveston Seawall and mark a holiday while thousands of miles from home. The Moldovan and Serbian immigrants took out plastic baggies decorated with cartoon pandas and snorted what they thought was cocaine, according to a Galveston Police spokesman. But instead of a rush of energy, the powder slowed their breathing to a stop. The powder contained fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid. Police found their bodies on Christmas Day. Two legal immigrants employed in drudgery to make their American dreams come true had become opioid overdose statistics. I recently wrote about my experience working in restaurants, and like any place where people work long hours in high-stress jobs for little pay, drugs are prevalent. People want to bring pleasure to their hardscrabble lives, even if for only a few hours, and drugs offer it. Pharmaceutical companies and pharmacy chains are settling civil lawsuits alleging recklessness in how they distributed opioid drugs like OxyContin. But the billions of dollars in payments to state and local governments have done nothing to slow the overdoses that have claimed more than 100,000 lives a year over the last few years. Experts say we are entering a fourth wave of the overdose crisis. In the first wave, people became addicted to prescription drugs, which led to overdoses. When doctors stopped prescribing so many opioids, people moved to illegal alternatives like heroin. But demand outstripped supply, so suppliers began making illegal formulations of fentanyl, which is used for anesthesia in surgeries. The fourth wave of deaths is coming from suppliers and dealers blending fentanyl with other drugs, like cocaine and methamphetamines. Buyers often don't understand what they've bought. Fifty years after former President Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs, Americans should admit defeat. No amount of smuggling interdiction or incarceration has stopped the flow of drugs, and today, overdose deaths are the highest ever. We need to stop expecting the criminal justice system to solve a health care problem. Humans have always used drugs and always will. What's needed is compassionate care, so people don't self-medicate with illicit drugs and can access programs to help them stop if they do. To stop the slaughter, we need to make drugs safe and available to those who use them. Dozens of programs are reducing the harm by providing access. Now it's up to families, employers and society to stop moralizing and address this health crisis before it claims more young lives. | 
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