14 ms·

After watching a 30 year old female overdose in a parking lot and not being able to be saved by first responders or emergency responders I've realized this prob

• delecti 9y ago
  There were less than 150 terrorist deaths in the US this decade [1] and tens of thousands of opioid deaths every year in the US [2]. Terrorism is closer to the threat posed by crush deaths from vending machines [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#2010.E2.80.93present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States... [2] https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o... [3] http://journals.lww.com/jorthotrauma/Abstract/1992/06000/Soda_Pop_Vending_Machine_Injuries__An_Update_.9.aspx http://journals.lww.com/jorthotrauma/Abstract/1992/06000/Sod...
  • bitexploder 9y ago
    By the numbers yes, but terror alters behavior of society as a whole. But I do agree the overall impact is lower, but at what cost to society? How much resources does it take to keep the impact as low as it is?
    • cjslep 9y ago
      Opioids also alters the behavior of society as a whole, to a larger degree than terrorism (albeit in a less flashy manner). When people can't get their addictive painkillers legally, illicit trade and overdosing permeates society, causing cascading side effects to society such as homelessness and crime. This is not normal.
      • heymijo 9y ago
        Yes and it goes beyond homelessness and crime. Social services, never built to handle an epidemic like this, are overrun. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/17/ohio-drugs-child-protection-workers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/17/ohio-drugs-c... Hospitals are ill-equipped to handle addicts and the tangled web of birth, opiates, and crime that comes with it. The result: kids die. http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/baby-opioids/ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/baby-opio... The mere aspect of caring for a child born with what they call neonatal abstinence syndrome e.g. babies addicted to opiates is too much for the current system. Lily's Place in West Virginia is one response, but it's a drop in the national bucket. http://wvpublic.org/post/lilys-place-continuing-care-addicted-babies#stream/0 http://wvpublic.org/post/lilys-place-continuing-care-addicte... Now picture a school in a community overrun by this trying to contend with children born addicted to opiates, and parents who merely shrug when social services takes their children away. Portsmouth, Ohio is one that has been hard hit by the opioid epidemic. There is no safety net for this sort of thing, and it's crushing the institutions that it touches while wrecking the community. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/17/drugs-opiod-addiction-epidemic-portsmouth-ohio https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/17/drugs-opiod-... I can feel the anger in this post but please know it's not directed at you or HN. I see this up close and the hopelessness of it all, makes me feel impotent to meaningfully help, and subsequently, angry.
        • tomjen3 9y ago
          That is probably the most depressing hn comment ever.
      • bitexploder 9y ago
        I didn't disagree, but it isn't fair to compare only deaths. Terror can destroy the economy suddenly. Cause huge societal shifts. Opoid epidemic is a horrible and slow wasting. There is a definite "terror isn't a big deal, barely kills anyone" bias on HN. I do agree it is very hard to quantify and endlessly used to abuse authority and gain new authority that doesn't solve real terror problems. And there are real problems. They just get co-opted by politicians. Anyway, I have direct familial experience with relatives becoming addicted to prescription painkillers, so I don't need to be convinced, I grew up in the deep south, and have seen the impact first hand. Folks go from opiods to alcohol and meth. Their body is cooked by 40. It breaks families and is a quietly suffered epidemic. Terror is flashy and in your face. No one cares if your uncle died when you were 15 addicted to alcohol and meth. You get all sorts of patriotic platitudes about heroism if your relative is killed by a terrorist. Edit: It informs life choices in interesting ways. When that tough on his luck guy comes over, smelling like a still at 11am, I can relate to where that guy is. So I let him pet my dog on our walk and treat him with kindness, because not many others will. It is about as hopeless a problem as you can find when a family member is in deep. Anyway, we do other things, but everyone has a hard go at it in life, some people just have it harder and deserve compassion. We do other things to help, but everyone loves petting dogs.
  • pmoriarty 9y ago
    And hundreds of thousands if not millions due to car accidents, drinking-related, smoking-related, and obesity-related illnesses.
    • refurb 9y ago
      I've never seen a society destabilized by car accidents, smoking, obesity or drug abuse. I have seen societies destabilized by terrorism.
      • vkou 9y ago
        If you'd like to see a society destabilized by drug abuse, visit some of the... Less well-off reservations. Or these days, anywhere in Appalachia. Oh? Drugs are not the source of their problems? Well, neither is terrorism. It doesn't happen in a vaccum. The kind of terrorism that destabilizes societies takes place in the middle of civil wars. If you are in the middle of a civil war, terrorism is not your problem.
        • verroq 9y ago
          You're right. We should just all get used to terrorism now, a few dead a year is the best we can do.
          • NickSharp 9y ago
            Correct. If we as a society could somehow "get used to terrorism" it would be no more of a threat than falling vending machines, as pointed out above. Plus, we'd save billions of dollars and countless hours of productivity. Not that I'm expecting this to happen, but one can imagine...
            • schrodinger 9y ago
              I do generally agree that terrorism isn't a threat worth changing our lifestyles over. However, I wonder if it's a little unfair to average out the probabilities and compare to something closer to an actual random event, like falling vending machines; surely, a terrorist attack is significantly more likely to occur in a place like New York than Middle America, no? I'd really like to see something like what's the probability of being killed by a "falling vending machine" IN NEW YORK vs a terrorist attack IN NEW YORK, than something country wide.
  • enknamel 9y ago
    As an average citizen I bunch events into the categories of 1 "Things I Can Prevent" and 2 "Things I Cannot Prevent". Opioids fall into category 1. I refuse to take any opioids even when prescribed because I do not want to go near such dangerous substances. However terrorist attacks, mass shootings, crazy people, etc fall into category 2. Category 2 frightens me quite a bit more than category 1. I'm willing to bet that a ton of people feel the same way as me. And that's probably why issues like terrorism get a ton of air time and issues like opioids get very little.
    • prklmn 9y ago
      Many people who end up taking opioids say the same thing you say, and swear them off. It's easy to say that you won't take them until you're in pain that makes you feel as if you're dying, then it's a different story.
      • oculusthrift 9y ago
        yeah but not all the people taking them are in that sort of pain. most are just ordinary drug addicted people
        • acover 9y ago
          Source? From what I have read the major cause of the opioid crisis is doctors prescribing opioids for pain [0]. Even 2 week prescriptions have 25% chance of creating an addict [1]. Remember originally these were marketed to doctors as non-addictive. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_crisis [1] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/with-a-10-day-supply-of-opioids-1-in-5-become-long-term-users/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/with-a-10-day-supply...
          • MaysonL 9y ago
            And the major cause of doctors prescribing opioids for pain is: Purdue Pharma propaganda and bribes. [0][1] [0]http://theweek.com/articles/541564/how-american-opiate-epidemic-started-by-pharmaceutical-company http://theweek.com/articles/541564/how-american-opiate-epide... [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ title: "The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin: Commercial Triumph, Public Health Tragedy"
  • gozur88 9y ago
    But terrorists are people, not natural events. IMO this is a dangerous line of thinking, since there exist ways to kill millions of people at a time.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • bjoyx 9y ago
    > Terrorism is closer to the threat posed by crush deaths from vending machines This is a fallacy. In the case of terrorism "past performance is not an indicator of future results". An attack with e.g. a biological weapon could cause, on a single day, 1000x the cumulative number of deaths we had over the past decade. There is no possibility of the number of crush deaths from vending machines rising like that.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • justinjlynn 9y ago
      You make a good point. Surely there's a way statistics account for this "damage potential". How do statistics treat things like nuclear incidents, etc?
      • ComputerGuru 9y ago
        They're called "black swan events." Apart from writing difference of books and publishing hundreds of papers on the subject (see Nassim Talib), the tl;dr is economists and sociologists still really have no way of truly accounting for them besides being cognizant of their existence.
        • microcolonel 9y ago
          My understanding is that you multiply the cost by the probability, or use a power of the cost (since the impact of a huge liability or disabling disaster is usually more than the accounted-for direct damage).
          • devoply 9y ago
            Do we do that for various financial endeavors and shut them down due to the economic risk posed? Cost of 9/11 was rather large, but it was not that large simply due to terrorism, it was that large due to the failure of various measures meant to prevent it... all aligning into a perfect storm.
  • theseatoms 9y ago
    The comparison of terrorism to the opioid epidemic (which is both heartbreaking and underreported) or vending machines deaths breaks down when one factors in nuclear weapons, attacks on critical infrastructure, etc. Violence from terrorism has fat tails. But, of course, multiple things can be bad at once.
    • vkou 9y ago
      The odds of a terrorist group detonating a nuclear weapon are, for all intents and purposes, zero. The odds of a terrorist group detonating a dirty bomb are not, but the casualties from one will be much, much lower then what they can accomplish with an equivalent effort put into bathtub explosives. The danger of nation-states using their arsenal of nuclear weapons against each-other is at least two orders of magnitude greater. If those two nation states are the US, and Russia, the death toll will also number in the hundreds of millions. If you really want to optimize for 'not dying in a nuclear explosion', you should be clamoring for immediate, unconditional disarmament, instead of worrying about orcs from Mordor carrying out Hollywood suitcase nuke plots.
    • TallGuyShort 9y ago
      The irrational fear about "terr'ists" the parent post is getting at, though, seems to rarely have anything to do with cataclysmic events like nuclear weapons these days. I literally hear people I know talk about keeping their guard up around Muslims because they're afraid of knife attacks, or you see the TSA freaking out about people pulling their clear plastic bag containing travel size toothpaste out of their suit case when this particular airport doesn't require you to do that. Statistically, individual acts of terrorism like that are indeed exceptionally unusual.
    • losteric 9y ago
      Well, the opioid epidemic is arguably a subset of a broader problem including poorly managed antibiotics and pesticides. Genetic engineering is part of the fat tail here.
    • douche 9y ago
      I'm constantly amazed, as vulnerable as we are, that in 20 years, there has only been one significant terrorist action within the United States.
  • subterfudge44 9y ago
    This statistical comparison is completely irrelevant because it has totally different type of distribution. You can look at car accidents of last 10 years and confidently say next year will have X deaths in car accident. Terrorism however has a fat tailed distribution. All your last 20 years of data is useless if some Buddhist terrorist managed to bring a small nuclear weapon in a downtown of some large American city or some Hindu monk poisoned public water distribution system with some deadly poison or some Amish lady releases anthrax in an amusement park. Threat of terrorism may not be as sever as worth destroying Iraq or Syria or travel ban. May be US government's policies are actually increasing that threat instead of lowering it but that sort of comparison should be used on HN simply because it is incorrect.
  • microcolonel 9y ago
    Terrorist plots are foiled on at least a daily basis. If we didn't try as hard as we do, we'd see a lot more success.
  • curun1r 9y ago
    You should probably include most US combat deaths in the terrorism category because, no matter how little Iraq had to do with 9/11, we wouldn't have been in a war there or Afghanistan without terrorism. Veteran suicides and overdoses can probably also be attributed to terrorism as they followed from the wars. War casualties are only in the thousands over the entirety of the war, but there's about 20 veteran suicides per day, so the deaths indirectly attributable to terrorism are actually quite a bit higher than your number.
    • delecti 9y ago
      Veteran suicide rates are comparable to civilian suicide rates, and even including all combat and terrorism deaths in the last 20 years together we're at around 10,000, compared to 35,000 opioid deaths in just 2015. And honestly, the Iraq war is as related to terrorism as vending machine crush deaths. That was our dumb fault. That was a military industrial complex power grab.
      • curun1r 9y ago
        > the Iraq war is as related to terrorism as vending machine crush deaths This is just wrong. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but 9/11 provided the political cover that the Bush administration needed to take the country to war. Absent that terrorist act, there's no way that the American public and the international community would have stood by and allowed the US invasion to take place the way that they did because of 9/11.
  • chongli 9y ago
    How about averaging the number of deaths over the past 2 decades instead? I bet you'd get a different result [0]. [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/31/terrorists-vs-chairs-an-outlier-story/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/31/terrorists-vs-chairs-a...
    • delecti 9y ago
      Average them over the past 2 decades and terrorism is still at ~1/100 the level of opioids.
  • paulddraper 9y ago
    Oh, come on. Terrorism killed 160 people/year in the US over the past two decades. [1] Terrorism killed 33,000 people globally in 2014. [2] Vending machines deaths in the US are 2-3/yr. [3] There's hardly a comparison. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11_attacks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11... [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3322308/Number-people-killed-terrorists-worldwide-soars-80-just-year.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3322308/Number-peopl... [3] https://www.quora.com/Fact-Vending-machines-kill-4-times-as-many-people-as-sharks-per-year-How-can-that-be https://www.quora.com/Fact-Vending-machines-kill-4-times-as-...
    • acover 9y ago
      3,000 deaths from September 11th 2001. 33,000 from opioid overdoses in 2015 [1]. That's like 11 9/11's every year. I'm not afraid of terrorists. I am worried if I take opioids after a root canal I'll become a drug addict [2]. [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/ https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/ [2] - https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/with-a-10-day-supply-of-opioids-1-in-5-become-long-term-users/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/with-a-10-day-supply...
      • collyw 9y ago
        Opioids (like driving) have some benefit to wider society. Terrorist attacks don't.
        • acover 9y ago
          I agree they are not identical situations. Driving is not a good analogy either. A 2 week prescription gives you a 25% chance of becoming an addict. That is Russian roulette odds. Driving everyday all year has about a 1 in 10,000 chance of death. Driving is a necessity in most places. Opioids are not.
    • morsch 9y ago
      The vast majority of the global death toll attributed to terrorism in the article is in anarchic countries plagued by (civil) war -- Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria.
  • zghst 9y ago
    Many US citizens still die overseas in terrorist attacks, for instance, 11 American souls were lost this week due to a suicide bomb in Kabul. Not to mention the whole black market economy that surrounds terrorism, along with human trafficking and other dark criminal activity that coalesce together. Quantifying these operations that seek to undermine the integrity and saftety of our societies (sometimes successfully) doesn't really do any favors, especially when putting the staggering amount of hidden costs that we don't know of today into play.
  • gadders 9y ago
    >> this decade... I think that's known as carefully picking your sample population to get the result you want.
    • delecti 9y ago
      Yes, it was a convenient (one nice block of the table) and admittedly not statistically honest sample. That said, even if we include the whole of US history (that whole wiki article) it's still an average of roughly 1/100 as many people dying each year of terrorism compared to opioid deaths. Even if we include the whole of US history terrorism deaths, it's still about 1/10 the number of terrorism deaths than opioid deaths just in 2015.
• tfinniga 9y ago
  I'd argue that this is much more dangerous than terrorism. Most things are. The main danger of terrorism is that we injure ourselves.
  • kbenson 9y ago
    I think "just as" was being use colloquially to mean "at least as".
• keevie 9y ago
  Just as dangerous as terrorists? According to this https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm655051e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm655051e1.htm, in 2014 alone, there were 28,647 deaths from opioids in the US. In the last /decade/, it depends on how you do the math, but it was less than 100 people. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/05/viral-image/fact-checking-comparison-gun-deaths-and-terrorism-/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/oct/... edit: I see I was beaten to the punch here.
• pizza 9y ago
  People need to be able to replace opioids with safer alternatives. Cannabis, kratom, etc. Not going to work for everybody of course but many people will probably be saved that way.
• deleted 9y ago
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• shard972 9y ago
  This is something Ive been tracking in the US for a few years even though I live in Australia. It's painfully obvious why it's been suppressed for so long. All you need to is look at who the top advertisers with news organisations are, then imagine why they very rarely cover negative stories about drug companies. Hell just to name 1 big example, the elderly couple who were passed out in the car with their grandchild in the back. When it went viral, the claim was they were doing illegal opioids and days later when it settled down it was found out to be prescription meds.
• refurb 9y ago
  Sorry, but I'm going to take a different perspective. This will not destroy society if not stopped. We've had opioid epidemics in the past. Drug choice changes over time. Not long ago meth was the scourge of the land. It will ebb and flow. Humans have always wanted to use mind altering drugs. What makes that a problem is prohibition. What's nice is I think society is slowly realizing that and turning to harm reduction. The safe injection sites and prescribed heroin are a couple good examples of that.
  • md224 9y ago
    Thank you. The solution is, paradoxically, to increase access to opiates so nobody has to buy on the black market.
    • freedomben 9y ago
      I agree completely. I also feel for all the pain patients out there that are now being targeted for needing medication. The crazy restrictions the DEA has placed and the fact that virtually every doctor is now terrorized into refusing to prescribe any sort of opioid is hurting real people. We are going about this the wrong way.
    • Clubber 9y ago
      That's what really kicked this epidemic into high gear. The government decided to "crack down" on pills and now all the people who were hooked switched to heroin, which is harder to gauge dosage because it doesn't say right on the bottle. I don't think our government is humble enough to admit the mistake, so many more people will die.
      • chongli 9y ago
        humble enough to admit the mistake So many of the worst tragedies in life seem to be caused by this. Arrogance, shame, saving face, covering your ass. Humans can be so cruel to each other when we try to do the right thing. We bow to peer pressure when we're 16 and end up wrapping mom's sports car around a tree. Ahhh, damn.
• aanm1988 9y ago
  Lets by realistic, this is far more dangerous day to day than terrorism. Neither are going to destroy the country. These drugs are going to destroy a lot of lives though.
• deleted 9y ago
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• InclinedPlane 9y ago
  It is already worse than the AIDS epidemic ever was in the US (although that too might come back). It's become a significant factor in declining life expectancies in the US among certain demographics.