What was your point if not propoganda? Just to let us know drug abuse is bad? Is this new information? Your comment doesn't offer interesting information, a solution, not even a personal experience. That's why I think it's right wing propaganda.
Just like foxnews you repeat something over and over in order to imprint it on the ding dongs who base their knowledge off hearsay instead of facts.
"Oh look a post about something bad that happens everywhere but I can increase the association level with cities run by democrats in order to justify my political support. Because if the opposition is suffering worse than me then I'm not wrong in who I support...even if it's not true"
Assuming "Opioid use" is the indicator of "negative emotions" of some kind, then the statistics at least indicate that we need to be focusing on white, rural women's issues primarily.
With that being said, there's clearly something wrong going on in rural America, at least if Opioid abuse and suicide rates are anything to go by. Just the stats.
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I hate to blame a complex issue like suicide on drugs. There's more to any particular case than just drug use. But with so many Opioid deaths in rural white America (especially women), I think this is a statistic that needs to be better known.
Note: It might be cultural (over-prescription by rural doctors), and not necessarily related to politics. But its certainly an issue that needs to be focused on.
Part of the opioid crisis caused by basically bribing doctors
Yes I’m well aware that when drug abuse was happening in the “inner cities” where the government looked the other way because it was more concerned with propping up countries during the Cold War, the same people who want to treat drug addiction like a “disease” when it’s happening in “rural America”, it blamed “single mothers” and “lack of morals”.
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]
Perhaps the wording is a bit harsh - not everywhere is a cesspool, a lot of places have bounced back, but the rust belt is particularly bad in area of opioid abuse - that is fact and very accurate.
I follow the reasoning, it just strikes me as facile. Surely not every town with a statistically-outlying amount of opiod drug purchases is full of addicts. Some towns have hospitals that are not part of the town's population. Or clinics. Or pain centers. You're mixing up a bunch of stats and claiming a conspiracy.
Yes, in general there's something amiss, no doubt. But in general people are married with 2.3 kids. Generalities don't public policy make.
If we're all going to go banging on the drug companies, and I'm fine with that, by the way, then let's talk about lobbying, kickbacks for doctors, marketing, and so forth. They're doing actual direct things that may be making the problem worse. Failure to follow up on anomalies like this isn't one of them. What would you have them do? Create a report, investigate each problem? Will you deny pain drugs to people who need them because other people in their town are using a pill mill? There's no remedy here that makes any sense.
What it feels to me like is an easy fishing expedition where you can put together some reports, make a few statements, bring in Big Pharma for a photo op. Maybe get some donations for the next election. It doesn't feel like any kind of process aimed at either discovering or dealing with causality. It's crap.
Worse still, you play these stupid games, you end up having discussions like we did with the cigarette companies. Most people who smoke do not get cancer. That's a true stat -- they usually die from heart disease or other causes before they live that long. Stats are fun. You can do all kinds of things with them, just about anything. (Insert long discussion here about the problems encountered when stats are used)
Sorry. I didn't mean to pick on you. Like I said, the article itself bugged me. We have a serious problem and we need to take serious action to help people. I think because it's such a serious problem, people tend to overreact in public discussion. A bit of hyperbole is fine. Personal attacks are not. Hopefully I didn't do that.
Rural areas are getting wrecked by globalization everywhere. Not just the US. Spain, btw, is one of the prime examples. Yet no opioid addiction.
Assuming that people kinda decide to just do drugs because despair is a bit ridiculous. Theres always a reason to do drugs. Almost noone was born an addict, and if you reason that those addictions originated at doctors appointments (prescribed medicine), it was probably not some kind of recreational turned addict thing.
Or are you trying to argue that its the national sport of rural folks to go to their local doctor and check the opioid menu for the flavour of the month opioid to shoot up their vein because they're out of a job and feel despair about it? That sounds a bit far-fetched.
I'm seeing similar increases in heroin use in my small midwest hometown. Multiple overdose deaths monthly, as well as arrests.
I honestly don't get what most of the other commenters are going on about. The stats are pretty widely reported on the massive increase in opioid abuse.
They must live on the coasts or otherwise have avoided what has been plaguing many states in recent years
Bro my old city's opiate overdose death rates have doubled annually for several years now. I have several friends whose lives have been claimed by opiates in that span of time. It's most certainly a thing. No offense but you shouldn't talk completely out of your ass.
It’s amazing that when the opioid crisis hit “rural America” people blame the distributors and called it a “disease”. But when it was rampant in the “inner cities” it was about “moral failings” and the lack of discipline. Even though the drug problem in the inner city was also caused by the government actively propping up governments where it was being produced in service to the Cold War.
Anyone writing opioid epidemics only happen in the US is either poorly informed or is intellectually dishonest. I assume the second here, since this reads like contemporary agitprop.
You really believe that? That most people who are getting addicted in rural America are getting addicted because they were first on prescription pain medicine - including all of the abuse of drugs based on over the counter pseudoephedrine?
And this is just what I’m referring to. It couldn’t possibly be that poor people in rural America are abusing drugs for the same reason that poor people in the “inner city” are using it. Because those drug dealers in rural America are “responsible people”.
There were also stiffer penalties for crack than the same amount of cocaine.
The entire reason that weed became illegal in the first place was because it was used by Mexicans.
> look at other extremely expensive cities around the world
The opioid epidemic is a US-only problem, so looking at other world cities won't tell you much beyond "Yeah, Purdue pharma shouldn't have convinced doctors to get millions of people addicted to opioids."
I'm not who you're replying to, but don't you think that given we know pill mills exist, it's likely the data is actually highly location specific? I.E., a city with one is more likely to have lots of ODs compared to the national average? Have you taken a statistic course? At this point I'm not sure what you're objecting to anymore.
> The US is really grappling with diseases of despair, and heroin/fentanyl addition is on of the biggest ones impacting the wellbeing of our society.
This is a false narrative. Tobacco use kills 7-8x more every day, week, and month in the USA. That's a legitimate industry, though, so that's not pushed on the news.
Opiates aren't that big an issue, they're just the one the media tells you to care about.
Opioid addiction is because opioids make you feel really good and they are really addictive and they had a tendency to be overprescribed. Blaming the economy for opioids is like blaming airplanes for AIDS.
As far as the wasteland heartland, I am not sure if Texas is included in the heartland, but the Texas economy is one of the biggest in the world — about as large as the GDP of Canada and larger than that of South Korea. Basically Texas is the 9th or 10th largest economy in the world. California is 5th or 6th. The state of Ohio’s economy is only slightly smaller than the entire country of Belgium.
The desolate wastelands are in the non-major cities and towns of Europe. Avignon France, for example, in the city center, has blocks and blocks of boarded up storefronts. Unemployment in Avignon is over 15% and only 35% even earn enough to have to pay income tax. Gary, Indiana, about as heartland as it gets, has a 7.6% unemployment rate — a rate that is declining. By European standards of GDP, disposable income and unemployment, Gary is a boomtown.
Don’t just consume the NPR-worthy stories of the death of the US heartland. Remember, most media outlets in the vein of the Atlantic, NPR, etc., they are typically coastal elites who have barely ever visited the heartland, let alone actually lived or worked there. They are also an echo chamber pushing an when’d a of a certain political persuasion, so it helps their narrative when “fly-over country” isn’t doing well.
The headline had me boiling- I was born in Alabama, where there are 1.2 opioid prescriptions per person[1], so the opioid epidemic hits hard for me.
After reading the article, I was less shocked. Sounds like he wants to demilitarize, if you will, the regulation of opioid pain medication, by having HHS handle it instead.
> The opioid crisis is a product of, ironically, crackdowns on opioid abuse.
This does not mesh with reality in states like West Virginia, where drug companies sent 9 million pills in two years to a town with less than 400 people - 780 million pills in six years to a state with 1.8 million people.
As the "crackdown" revved up in these states, more people have died as they've turned to replace their prescription habit with heroin, and street heroin is increasingly being laced with fentanyl analogs which cause nearly instant overdoses.
Not pinning this on the drug companies or doctors that are handing out these drugs like candy to anyone willing to write a check is putting the blame way downstream of where it belongs. The DEA sure can crackdown on marijuana and molly but Rx drug abuse? Move along, citizen. Nothing to see here.
Opiod overdoses have devastated rural areas. https://www.usda.gov/topics/opioids
What was your point if not propoganda? Just to let us know drug abuse is bad? Is this new information? Your comment doesn't offer interesting information, a solution, not even a personal experience. That's why I think it's right wing propaganda.
Just like foxnews you repeat something over and over in order to imprint it on the ding dongs who base their knowledge off hearsay instead of facts.
"Oh look a post about something bad that happens everywhere but I can increase the association level with cities run by democrats in order to justify my political support. Because if the opposition is suffering worse than me then I'm not wrong in who I support...even if it's not true"
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