It's time, finally, to face the ugly truth. We've lost the war on drugs in America. We need a new playbook, now, before more lives are lost.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that fatal drug overdoses in America were the highest in recorded history in 2014. The news is grim. But what the new CDC data say about certain aspects of American society more broadly right now is even scarier, to be honest.

CDC reported that fatal drug overdoses killed nearly 50,000 Americans in 2014, which is a new high. To put another way, more people died of drug overdoses than were killed in auto accidents last year.

More than half of the deaths involved either heroin or prescription narcotic painkillers like OxyContin. These two classes of drugs were responsible for more than 28,000 deaths in 2014, the CDC reported, or 61 percent of the fatal drug overdoses.

Despite an endless interdiction and criminal justice effort for seemingly forever, heroin and prescription painkillers are easy to find, easy to use, and relatively cheap to obtain on the street. No one in any demographic was immune. Men and women of every race and ethnic group, of all ages, were affected. If you want to get high, you're going to get high. The "war on drugs" isn't going to stop you.

But here's the truly scary part. That number – 50,000 deaths from fatal drug overdoses – is double the number of Americans who died from drug overdoses in 2000.

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Let that fact sink in for a moment.

After our government at the local, state and federal level has declared that we would "win" the war on drugs on our streets – an effort that has cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars; sent a significant proportion of young, black men to prison on drug convictions; and triggered violent police confrontations in known drug havens in urban areas – we have not only lost, we're getting overrun.

How in the world is it possible that the number of fatal drug overdoses in America has doubled in just 14 years? I mean, how is that really possible in the wealthiest country on Earth?

Here's how. We're playing a loser's game at every level with drug treatment and our societal response to what is happening inside people's brains when they enter the world of drug dependency. We're not recognizing just how victimized people are once they're on a path that, for 50,000 Americans annually leads to death from a fatal drug overdose.

These numbers won't get better – this killing won't stop – until we recognize the true nature of this tragedy. More police on the streets, in the air, on the waterways and in the train stations and airports won't reverse this trend. Putting even more, young, black men in prison on drug charges won't solve the equation. Only a deep, caring understanding of the true nature of drug addiction will set us free.

Once heroin "gets a hold of you," it never lets go, the son of a good friend of mine wrote in The Washington Post several years ago after he nearly died of a drug overdose. The only reason my friend's son survived is because his drug buddy - also high on heroin at the time - dialed 911 before he ran away, and paramedics arrived just in time minutes before his near-certain death from a heroin overdose.

My friend's son is incredibly lucky. Tens of thousands of Americans each year aren't.

Heroin takes all the pain away. And then it changes your brain. You don't worry about anything – whether you can pay the bills next month, whether you have the ability to raise a kid, whether your job might vanish next month – when you're on heroin. These types of drugs - heroin, and prescription narcotic painkillers – take hold of our brains and never truly let go.

This is the pain that we need to understand. This is what we must confront and deal with in society. An endless war on drugs will never deal with this. We can take away the cheap supplies of heroin, make it infinitely harder to obtain prescription painkillers, and people will still find a way to obtain something that "gets a hold" of your brain and never lets go.

There are many, varied examples of addiction across a broad swath of American society, addiction stories that all basically tell the same story – our brains are highly susceptible to things that take hold and don't let go.

For instance, while smoking rates are thankfully now the lowest in American history – about 17 percent of Americans still smoke – we finally understand nicotine is powerfully addictive and it takes considerable effort to quit smoking.

What's more, we now know that nearly 100 percent of smoking addiction occurs in an adolescent brain that's still being formed. Smoking "takes hold" of growing neurons and synapses in a teenaged brain and never lets go. Armed with that knowledge, families now understand what they're confronting with cigarettes and can help their kids.

This is the sort of knowledge we need to confront in what is clearly an epidemic with heroin and prescription painkillers. When the number of fatal drug overdoses is double the rate it was 14 years ago, despite a massive criminal and legal war on drugs, then something is terribly wrong.