“We’re putting a lot of emphasis on prevention because of how difficult it is once they’ve gotten involved with this,” said Carson. “It means educating people. It means looking at the gateway. It disturbs me that I see so many people trying to legalize marijuana, for instance. It’s a well-known gateway. But not only that, but as a pediatric neuroscience, I recognize that the human brain continues to develop until your late 20s, and it is well-documented that cannabis affects the developing brain and can affect your IQ. We have enough people low IQs. We don’t need to be generating more.”
(Robert Kraychik – Breitbart) Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, joined Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss opioid addiction and abuse with host Alex Marlow.
Carson said, “[We are] recognizing that the opioid problem is pervasive throughout our society, and certainly we have a big problem with a lot of the people in assisted housing. We’re going to be talking about resources that we’ve dedicated to fighting the drug epidemic. When we look at homelessness, we look at our continual care programs, we’re talking about over $2 billion, a quarter of which is directed towards people with substance abuse.”
Carson described the addictive nature of opioids. “One of the things that people don’t realize is it’s very, very easy to get hooked on these drugs,” he said. “They’ve been overused, particularly for pain. They’re not all that effective for pain, to be honest with you. If you take somebody who’s having a lot of pain, you give him an opioid, and then you say, ‘How’s your pain?’ They’ll say, ‘It’s still there, but I don’t care.’ That’s what it does. It makes you not care about it. It doesn’t necessarily get rid of the pain.”
“It gets rid of emotional pain, too, ” added Carson. “A lot of people have that. They’re discouraged. They have all kinds of problems going on, and to be able to escape that feeling for just a few hours, it becomes irresistible, and once they experience it, it’s all they think about. That’s why you have this epidemic going on. Now, you couple that with the fact that we’re not doing an adequate job of keeping these drugs out, not only at the border but things that are coming through the mail from China and places like that, and it becomes overwhelming.”