Sep 18, 2017 3 min read

The old saw has it that you can’t put a price on a human life, and that’s true enough. It’s a given that the value of our lives goes beyond stark, dollars-and-cents calculations.

But we are all participants in the economy, so we all carry value in that realm, whether as workers, consumers or both. And while the economy has finally achieved a sounder footing in the last few years after long being mired in post-recession doldrums, it’s still bedeviled by nagging problems, such as the growing gulf between the richest and the poorest, the number of people toiling in low-paying, service-sector jobs and the lack of employment opportunities in many small towns and rural communities.

You can add another to that list: The opioid crisis.

Washington County Commissioner Diana Irey Vaughan recently told a meeting of the McMurray Rotary Club that the county has spent precisely $182,608 on one inmate, from court costs to the time she spent behind bars and the placement of her children in the county’s children and youth system. For anyone who doesn’t scan the real estate listings with any great frequency, $182,608 could get you a pretty decent house in this region.

So would the $216,000 that another inmate has cost the county, according to Irey Vaughan. And three-fourths of the criminal cases in the county are related to drug abuse.

Those inmates are not in the workforce, and the tax dollars being deployed for their incarceration and rehabilitation could have been used for other necessities.

It’s a problem not just in Washington County, but across the country.

Some economists believe the labor force participation rate – the number of people in a job or looking for one – has tumbled to 63 percent in the years since the Great Recession as a result of the opioid crsis.

Fewer working men in their prime are in the workforce than in the past, and it’s believed by many analysts, including Princeton University economist Alan Krueger, that many of those men on the sidelines are hooked on opioids, whether of the prescribed or illegal variety.

The opioid rampage has “major consequences to the economy, not just to the employer and employee who are losing productivity but also to civil society,” economist Howard Birnbaum recently told The New Yorker.

“If people don’t have jobs, they don’t have money to spend in the grocery store, on gasoline. It’s the old multiplier effect: the socioeconomic burden is much broader than on any individual or any firm.”

As we have noted before, the opioid crisis defies silver-bullet solutions.

There are treatment programs out there that have successfully gotten addicts off drugs, and a panel created by President Trump examining the opioid epidemic recommended in July that the opioid epidemic be declared a national emergency.

No action has been taken yet, but the emergency declaration would bring down some barriers to treatment, increase access to medications like methadone and allow Medicaid funds to be used for residential treatment programs.

The opioid epidemic is a drag on our economy.

More than that, it’s a pernicious killer, claiming as many American lives in a month as Osama bin Laden’s deranged acolytes did Sept. 11, 2001.

Calling it a national emergency is necessary and, let’s face it, stating the obvious.