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The opioid epidemic is an amazing example of human psychology and the power of a visual. More people die from it every year than Vietnam, yet there's been no la

• ataturk 8y ago
  The US has 330 million people. Do we really care if a bunch self-select out of the gene pool? The only way I would care is if I found out that a foreign power was behind this, i.e. getting people addicted to deadly substances in order to undermine our country. If it's just jackass flunkies doing it because they're jackass flunkies, then I'm just glad they aren't on the highways.
• pjc50 8y ago
  People have gone to a lot of effort to convince their fellow Americans that those that die from opioids deserve it. I'm sure some will turn up in this thread.
  • kauffj 8y ago
    "Deserve" is going overboard, but there's certainly a moral difference between something that happens due to one's own choices, vs. something that happens because it was compelled. It's reasonable have more sympathy for a conscripted soldier killed in a foreign war he had no desire to fight in than an opioid addict that died from a result of choosing to do drugs.
    • stjohnswarts 8y ago
      It's not going overboard. I've heard more than one person refer to it as Darwin at work or "they deserved it for being weak"
    • pjc50 8y ago
      Of course, someone could be both. Veterans have elevated risks of both drug use (often related to injuries) and suicide due to PTSD. https://centerstone.org/news-events/news/opioid-crisis-impacts-veterans-military-families/ https://centerstone.org/news-events/news/opioid-crisis-impac... The permanent war has long term casualties.
    • WhompingWindows 8y ago
      You're perpetuating a myth that drug use is all about personal choice. Many addicts started with prescription opioids, recommended by their doctor, and only moved to more dangerous options once their doctor's supply was extinguished. Doctors themselves over-prescribed these to attack pain, meanwhile they were being lied to by pharma about the addictiveness of opioids. On top of that, you have fentanyl being added to heroin to increase its potency, and also vastly increase the mortality rate. Finally, it may be hard for those of us who were never addicted to opioids to understand. It no longer becomes a simple choice when your body is extremely sick if you don't get your dose. This is one reason why a drug addict might steal from those they love, their illness is literally the most important physical sensation at any moment, overcoming familial and societal norms. It's a scourge and illness, not merely a choice.
  • kibwen 8y ago
    I actually don't think that those people really have any significant voice at all, let alone the ability to persuade anyone. Sympathy for the victims of the opioid crisis is one of the few things that spans the political divide; the right sees the outsize devastation it has on their rural constintuencies and the left wants to expand healthcare and decriminalize drugs. The only people I can imagine saying "they deserve it!!" are befuddled leftover Cold Warriors who still see Nancy Reagan every time they close their eyes, or else just transparent trolls who get off on inciting others. Sadly, it just so happens that those same people are in control of the government.
• MichaelApproved 8y ago
  Someone replied to you with an ignorant comment that was deleted. I'm copy/pasting it here anyway because they are spewing common misconceptions that need to be squashed. > The US has 330 million people. Do we really care if a bunch self-select out of the gene pool? While some people do choose to use drugs with their own free will, this epidemic isn't about that. Many people getting addicted have been initially prescribed the pain killers by a doctor for medical reasons and then got addicted. They didn't use recreationally. It's thanks to these ignorant comments that make them fearful of seeking help with the addiction. The was on drugs and the stigma it brings continues it's devastation... > The only way I would care is if I found out that a foreign power was behind this, i.e. getting people addicted to deadly substances in order to undermine our country. If it's just jackass flunkies doing it because they're jackass flunkies, then I'm just glad they aren't on the highways. It's not a foreign power, it's our own pharmaceutical companies attacking our citizens. From lobbying against medical marijuana as an alternative pain killer to pushing false information on doctors and patients about the addictive nature of their drugs. But pharmaceutical companies don't fit your typical stereotype of a villain and they flood our politics with cash, so they are getting away with murder. Finally, people regurgitating the garbage like "self-select out of the gene pool" are also a major part of the problem. How someone got addicted to drugs shouldn't be important. Whether It was due to recreational use or by a prescription, they need help and should not be ostracized. Our public funds should go to recovery centers, not law enforcement for victimless drug use. There are plenty of laws on the books to arrest someone who harms another, whether on drugs or not. We don't need laws specifically for drug use. Those people need medical help, not jail. edit: typos
  • verelo 8y ago
    Seems their comment is gone too. I’d love to have been given the chance to downvote them. To me this all boils down to what you’re saying, but I’d like to just add mention that i think the bigger disease in the US that enables situations like this is the acceptance of misinformation. As you pointed out, many many many of these cases are started by a medically issued prescription, and it kills multiple times more people than recent wars or terrorist related acts, yet anyone who drives action here is often labeled as “helping junkies that don’t deserve help”. In the very near future when climate change has destroyed our way of life, and one of the few nations that was capable of doing something is finally and certifiably recognized as having sat by and done nothing, i hope the world takes note. These are the kinds of acts of neglect that make Nero famous, and while i don’t want their names remember, i do want the world to move on from the US being seen as the worlds police and freedom fighters. If Kama is real, the US should be concerned, and as someone that is a close neighbour, it terrifying to think how that will flow on to impact the rest of us.
• stupidbird 8y ago
  I think it's the same issue as the prison population being so enormous. When someone does crime/drugs the country collectively just thinks that these people did it to themselves. I've heard people casually refer to criminals/addicts as animals, it's ridiculous.
  • JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Yes that's sad. But consider: what would you call someone who injected strangers with noxious drugs and enjoyed their torment? An animal? Is it so big a leap to think the same, when they're doing it to themselves?
    • Frondo 8y ago
      No, no person is a animal and it's misguided and inappropriate to make the comparison. People who behave cruelly aren't animals, they're people who behave cruelly and we should seek to minimize/stop their cruelty and ability to inflict it. Drug users, willing or no, also aren't animals. Drug users who want to stop should be given all the tools necessary to kick their habits. Drug users who don't want to stop should be given the tools necessary to reduce the harm to themselves and to society. Anything else is barbaric.
      • cryptonerd2212 8y ago
        Technically, we are animals.
        • stupidbird 8y ago
          We're not discussing taxonomy, so this is completely irrelevant.
    • MichaelApproved 8y ago
      Yes, it's a major leap and the fact that you can't see it is concerning. If you are enjoying someone else's tourment, especially after you inflicted that tourment onto them, then you are a psychopath. People who take drugs aren't taking it for the hangover, they are taking it for the high. If you remove the tormenting hangover, 100% of users would be fine with that. You should seek psychiatric help and I'd be happy if my tax dollars were used to help you with your mental problems.
• yesenadam 8y ago
  More people die from it every year than Vietnam [Kind of off-topic] I'm guessing you mean by 'than Vietnam', 'than Americans died in the Vietnam war"? (Well I think so. Apologies if not.) That's a pretty macabre unit. Can you imagine how a Vietnamese person would feel reading that? Maybe in Vietnam they say 'More people die from [something] every year than America' - meaning what they call the American War[0]. Wouldn't that sound super-weird. That's something like how what you said sounds to me. Only for them it would mean 1-3 million. [0] or the Resistance War Against America. edit: Downvoter, care to explain how I can improve my comment? Thanks.
  • harimau777 8y ago
    They are just using synecdoche. From the context of the comment and the shared culture of the audience people can understand what they are talking about. It's no different than how people in America know that if you talk about changes in government policy after "nine eleven" you mean the terrorist attacks not the sports car.
  • nabla9 8y ago
    I'm downvoting because you are getting offended for others (I'm assuming you are not Vietnamese). Avoiding common expressions because you are trying to guess that someone might be offended is going too far in caring and politeness. ps. You could also use car deaths per year (somewhat similar number) but then anyone who has lost relatives in car accidents might get offended by using these macabre numbers.
  • brotoss 8y ago
    You're being pedantic for the sake of outrage.
    • BeetleB 8y ago
      >You're being pedantic for the sake of outrage. Eh no. Imagine you're sitting in Canada and say "The opiod epidemic kills more people annually than WW II", and then when confronted, you say "Of course I mean Canadian lives in WW II!" Americans may only see 55000 deaths in Vietnam. The rest of the world (and HN is international in audience) sees a lot more.
• Nuzzerino 8y ago
  Have you been living under a rock or is my definition of large public outcry vastly different? I hear about this more than I hear about climate change issues (but not as much as about gun violence, which causes far fewer deaths in the US). But what causes far greater deaths than even opioids, is avoidable medical errors. It's quite difficult to stop a highly addictive class of drugs which is backed by big business (legal or illegal). But that many avoidable medical errors in 2018, despite the high barriers to become a doctor? Maybe we shouldn't be treating this opioid problem so gravely after all. The more serious, more deadly, more costly problem of avoidable medical errors could be even the root cause of the addiction epidemic. I spent the better part of my adult life as an addict, and yet not one doctor out of the many that I saw acknowledged or noticed. Furthermore, on the occasions I did muster enough courage to ask them if the drugs were causing harm (three different non-opioid drugs at different periods of my life), I was shrugged off, the doctors saying that my symptoms do not match up, or otherwise downplaying the situation. I needed hard evidence that what I was doing was actually harming me or I saw no incentive to quit. By the time one does enough chronic use to be at risk of death, I imagine the addiction and habit is far too strong to easily break. So I'm of the opinion that the root cause is with the medical profession's apparent limitations. It's often very hard to get medical help in general until something is plain and obvious, highly common, or literally killing you, with the evidence needing to show up on examination or test. This is something that I could be vastly improved with AI doctors and open access to anonymized health data. But given how much of a fight the taxi cab driver union puts up (with self driving cars and even Uber), I won't hold my breath for the AMA to get behind the idea.
• Shivetya 8y ago
  Some blame needs to rest on the shoulders of the CDC, even the AMA[1] has come out against the guidelines the CDC put up over two years ago that others have used as guidance, incorrectly. The CDC needs to clarify the guidelines or just flat out back off so that those in pain and prescribed pain medication can get it. Far too often the guidelines are being used by non Doctors to deny needed medication https://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2018/11/14/ama-calls-for-misapplication-of-cdc-opioid-guideline-to-end https://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2018/11/14/ama-calls...
• towelr34dy 8y ago
  This seems like a prevailing attitude, but I think it is based on a debunked thought processes. People used to think that heroin or other substances were inherently addictive in and of themselves. This was because of experiments on mice in Skinner boxes. But that is not how addiction works. Addiction is, in great measure, the result of animals being unhappy and trying to do something about it. This has been proven both in humans and in mice. Mice, and humans, generally don't get addicted when they have good things to do. To focus on the opioid side of our social dysfunction is just as useless as focusing on any other SYMPTOM of dysfunction. When I hear people talking about how horrible the epidemic is, I can't stop helping thinking of a flu analogy: This sniffling epidemic is really terrible. We should ban sniffling because sniffling people suffer, we need to protect them* if they sniffle. But let's not worry about people washing their hands... that's unrelated. * Generally implied is that by protecting people it means putting people in cages if they disobey our social commands.
• deleted 8y ago
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• porpoisely 8y ago
  > those lost lives will cost the US billions in lost productivity over time It's so strange how prevalent it has become in the past few years to talk of human beings in terms of productivity. Growing up in the 90s, all the talk was about how we were mindless consumers. Now, all I hear is people talking of others and themselves as producers and productivity. How they feel about themselves and their worth depends on whether they had a 'productive day'. What does that really even mean? It's amazing how quickly the vernacular changes. Never in a million years would I have ever thought of someone dying and juxtaposing that with productivity. Why even bring it up? Are we here just to produce for society or the wealthy or the government? 20 years ago, would we have been upset at all the consumers or consumption being lost through suicide and death? We are talking of others and ourselves like farmers talk about produce and livestock. Maybe that's what modern society has reduced us to. Livestock that needs to produce.
  • hirundo 8y ago
    Reporting on productivity change is a reasonable way to quantify the social impact of a phenomenon, which allows people to compare it in scale to other issues, and prioritize scarce resources accordingly. Of course it's imperfect, and data is lost compared to a qualitative assessment of individual lives. But can you think of a consistently better quantitative measurement? Longevity? We've recently seen a lot of coverage of the forecast that climate change could cause a 10% reduction in GDP by 2100. Your objections apply to this measure equally. But by quantifying the magnitude we can compare it to things like the cost of remediation. Quantifying an effect also has the benefit of exposing the estimate to more effective refutation. The more numerate debate we subject policy preferences to, the stronger they'll be.
• dahart 8y ago
  I heard an interesting podcast about how the pain scale used in hospitals and clinics is directly responsible for the opioid crisis, and it was intentionally designed to sell pain killers. You know the sheet you get when you visit a doctor that asks “how severe is your pain on a scale of 1-10”? The well intentioned scientist (June Dahl) who championed the widespread adoption of the pain scale recalls that when she was giving talks about it and it started to get a little traction, the pharma industry started pouring money into her campaign. At the time she thought it was just unbiased grant money without an agenda, but she later realized the intent was to sell more drugs. https://www.gimletmedia.com/science-vs/opioids-how-america-got-hooked https://www.gimletmedia.com/science-vs/opioids-how-america-g...
• superkuh 8y ago
  Your premise seems to be that all death should evoke equal concern. I think people being forced by threat of violence to commit violence against another group of people and dying during it is far worse than someone chosing of their own volition to use a recreation drug and making a mistake with their own life. I'd bet many people share my differentiation. I don't think it's primarily a 'visual' difference.