That's jabber to evade political nuance. Opoid and drug abuse is obviously heavily prevalent in American society, and is part of their mainstream culture and media. The Americans spent hundreds billions of dollars just in their media push to make drug abuse a part of everyday American life.
Opoid abuse has been _observed_ in other civilizations as leading to a collapse in labor throughput. The Middle Eastern empires, the Chinese Empires, etc... have all recorded _correlated_ evidence of opoid abuse to a collapse in economic throughput, but never "_proven_" it under the "rigor of Western Science".
The real question isn't so much as to _what_ caused the drop in labor force. It is obviously not only drug abuse, where drug abuse is understood to be a symptom of the problem(s). The question that the scientist cannot or will not answer is why the Americans did this to themselves.
Or, the dropping of American men from the labor force (i.e. not by their choice nor volition) could explain x% of opiod use...
Actually, this seems to be borne out be reporting of newer surveys and studies. Those in stable employment and social settings are less vulnerable to addiction. Even when they "experiment"; they have more reasons not to chase the experience down the rabbit hole.
I've heard this specifically from several recent sources of reporting. Different shows and segments, largely on public radio.
That's not to mention the growing media and public re-evaluation of addiction and its causes, treatments, remediations, and possible solutions -- alongside comparison with the increasingly obviously counter-productive and expensive "tough on crime" practices with respect to it -- now taking place in the U.S.
If you don't believe that research what opiods do to the human brain and then look at the opiod prescription statistics. In 2012 70% of the adults in the country were on prescription opiods. If you look at what opiods do to the brain and what happens when you take someone off of opiods, they literally couldn't do any of the jobs available today. Even simple manual labor jobs.
wages for certain positions may be significantly lower than they should be and many employers have gotten desperate to control the labor market.
The entire labor market in the united states is completely fake and has been for nearly twenty years but no one wants to admit this because they would have to admit that anyone on opiods for extended periods of time may be incapable of doing most common jobs.
It's the economy stupid. Americans have nothing in their lives but their jobs. Take those away and they start self-medicating. Well that's my pet theory any way. Also have to consider the demographic most affected by job loss.
Why not weed or alcohol? Because opiates produce a high and make you feel good. Much like work might, if you had it.
>Professor Krueger suggests that the increase in opioid prescriptions could account for about 20 percent of the decline in men’s labor-force participation from 1999 to 2015, and 25 percent of the observed decline in women’s labor-force participation.
It seems likely that lack of work and resulting depression would drive drug use as well. Depressed people often "self medicate".
Someone will no doubt reply that US unemployment is falling, and therefore so should the opiates crisis, but it's not a simple matter of economics and statistics, it's a question of what people believe about the world and their future in it. Someone who gets a bad, painful job with no agency or fulfilment will vanish from the unemployment stats but the despair remains.
(Mind you, both for-profit heathcare and a punitive, moralist approach to pain relief belong in the blame picture as well)
You seem to have confused the current opioid epidemic as being caused by globalism, or economic hopelessness as you put it.
None of your sources link those two, and U.S. unemployment is at a record low so I'm not sure what the point is you're trying to make here is. Yes, the opioid epidemic exists, but nobody was saying here that it doesn't, so why are you introducing it?
So what can be done? I usually update my theory about the situation when I read new articles, but now I'm really at a loss. I'd love to help these people, but I can't see a fool-proof solution.
Some questions come to mind:
- Is it the role of the government to keep people safe from themselves? If so, how?
- Would harsher drug laws make things better or worse?
- How big of a role does purported economic opportunity have to do with drug abuse? My theory used to be that structural unemployment was the root of this epidemic; those born into the quickly receding middle class---those who relied on low-knowledge/low-skill jobs for a modest living---are hit the hardest since they did not anticipate such a shortage of low-skill jobs.
- What does religion have to do with this?
- What does culture have to do with this?
- Are members of the military more or less affected by opiod drug abuse?
- Does providing safe places to take drugs alleviate the problem, or does it make it worse?
Huh? America can be economically ascendant - we have a LOT of businesses doing quite well with massive profits and cash holdings, tax rates completely aside - without being dominant in every single industry. Regional drug addiction trends are NOT national economic issues (the national economy has been going up at the same time as the opiod abuse!), but plainly regional ones.
What specific parts of the opiod issue do you think a lower corporate tax rate will fix?
Drug use is a symptom of lack of opportunities rather than the cause.
American men are using opioids because of the war on men waged by the elite and business elite.
When women are favored for jobs while men are being discriminated against and can't get jobs, then they turn to drugs.
Drug use is a result of lack of opportunities, it doesn't cause the lack of opportunities.
Look at what happened to china in the 1800s with their opium crisis when their society was attack by european powers.
Look at what happened to russia in the 1990s when lack of opportunities cause their male population to resort to drugs and alcohol.
This is a problem caused by bloomberg and the media.
When men are systematically disadvantaged in job prospects, when men are attacked as rapists in college campus and when the media wages a war against men in america, you can't offload the blame to "opioids".
The problem in america isn't opioids. It's the media and the elite.
>What caused it, why it is more than in other parts of the world and why so many painkillers?
>Is it cultural?
That's actually a really common misconception on HN. The United States ranks 27th among countries which abuse opiates, [1] behind many first-world countries like the UK, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Ireland, and Russia, to name a few.
What's the cause? A lot of HNers like to pin it on unemployment and low-wage, low-skill jobs. I think that's narrowing the field in the right direction, but it isn't quite right; I know many very happy people who just make ends meet. There's something more that no one has been able to pinpoint quite yet.
>driven in part by the effects of the opioid epidemic on younger adults in the U.S. and the impact of a severe flu season on older adults in other nations, two new studies suggest.
More likely we need to fix the socioeconomic circumstances that drive people toward opioids. Personally, I believe there is a complex cultural problem in the first world. We have it too easy, can subsist without working, and now that people are increasingly less religious, with nothing to do all day and nothing to replace god or community but vapid, consumerist materialism. So poor people turn to drugs to numb the emptiness in their lives.
M
Though I'm sure there's more involved.
Sullivan starts out highlighting how America is exceptionally afflicted by opioid abuse, but goes on to unconvincingly weave a bunch of unexceptional factors into his explanation.
Smartphones, TV, video games, online porn: they're in every developed country. They can't be the explanation for what's different about America. Decline of religiously-derived meaning? Most developed countries' populations place less importance on religion than Americans. Factory jobs squeezed by automation and cheap offshore labor? Canadian manufacturers have access to the same robots as American firms, and Canada has been a member of the World Trade Organization as long as the US has.
Inter-temporal comparisons also show that it doesn't make sense to blame the American opioid crisis on the decline of manufacturing jobs. The number of American manufacturing jobs peaked in the 1970s. "Rust belt" became a common term in the 1980s. But the opioid crisis is much more recent.
4. It became much easier and more fashionable for people in middle America to acquire and use opiates and methamphetamine.
5. We've had a slow collapse in the markets for routine manual labor, which were the backbone of small/mid-market middle America, which drew people into the cities set up a vicious cycle of depopulation and market decline in middle America.
Maybe some of the linked research decouples the suicide rate from these phenomenon, but I don't see enough meat in this article to make the case that psychiatric medication is the likeliest cause.
Tell that to the midwestern industrial towns, who for decades have massive job and population declines, and who see year after year of opiate deaths that exceed (in each year!!) the deaths from the Vietnam war in total, as a result of economic hopelessness. [0]
You talk about death rates. The suicide rate of working class white Americans has been sky rocketing [1]
You can ignore these and many many other data points to assume a narrative of unceasing improvement, but millions of people would rightly see that as nonsense. [2]
The economy has been getting better for close to a decade now, and we have seen the opioid use rate skyrocket during that time. If it was tied to the economy, why were those two trend lines moving in the same direction?
I think (without bothering to do any research to source my claim beyond my personal experience as a paramedic, and the sources available in the article) that the widespread availability of Naloxone (and other harm reduction based policies) are far more likely to be the cause of the decrease.
Opoid abuse has been _observed_ in other civilizations as leading to a collapse in labor throughput. The Middle Eastern empires, the Chinese Empires, etc... have all recorded _correlated_ evidence of opoid abuse to a collapse in economic throughput, but never "_proven_" it under the "rigor of Western Science".
The real question isn't so much as to _what_ caused the drop in labor force. It is obviously not only drug abuse, where drug abuse is understood to be a symptom of the problem(s). The question that the scientist cannot or will not answer is why the Americans did this to themselves.
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