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I read that close to 50,000 Americans die EACH year due to opioid overdose. I'm pretty sure this is more than the death total of the Vietnam, Korean, and Iraqi

I read that close to 50,000 Americans die EACH year due to opioid overdose. I'm pretty sure this is more than the death total of the Vietnam, Korean, and Iraqi wars combined. I can remember being a kid in the 70's and how the start of the news each night was about which local kids died in the Vietnam war during the past week. Perhaps it's time to declare this a war to save the (potential) addicts and act accordingly.

peatmoss 8y ago
As a society we habituate to a horrific human toll as long as we don’t viscerally experience a short-term shock. The US has ~10 9/11s worth of traffic fatalities per year, but we aren’t flipping out and dedicating ourselves to rebuilding transportation infrastructure, because we just don’t care that much. I hope that we don’t get too complacent about opiate deaths and start thinking of this as normal. We do need a nationwide coordinated mobilization I think. I hope it happens. I think it will require pragmatic political leadership that treats this as a public health crisis rather than a job solely for law enforcement.
- cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
  >The US has ~10 9/11s worth of traffic fatalities per year, but we aren’t flipping out and dedicating ourselves to rebuilding transportation infrastructure, because we just don’t care that much. That's a pretty cynical way to look at it. I would imagine that part of the lack of response is due to the fact that most traffic fatalities are not intentionally caused and are diffuse (many deaths across time and space instead of in one big incident in a small geographic area).
intopieces 8y ago
>Perhaps it's time to declare this a war to save the (potential) addicts and act accordingly. The Wars on Terror, Drugs and Poverty have all been abject failures. War is a terrible metaphor for this problem. War implies at least some semblance of a defined enemy. The issues here are interconnected and require nuanced discussion and debate. Simply calling it a war will not get the people of Seattle that.

peatmoss 8y ago

As a society we habituate to a horrific human toll as long as we don’t viscerally experience a short-term shock. The US has ~10 9/11s worth of traffic fatalities per year, but we aren’t flipping out and dedicating ourselves to rebuilding transportation infrastructure, because we just don’t care that much. I hope that we don’t get too complacent about opiate deaths and start thinking of this as normal. We do need a nationwide coordinated mobilization I think. I hope it happens. I think it will require pragmatic political leadership that treats this as a public health crisis rather than a job solely for law enforcement.

cuckcuckspruce 8y ago
>The US has ~10 9/11s worth of traffic fatalities per year, but we aren’t flipping out and dedicating ourselves to rebuilding transportation infrastructure, because we just don’t care that much. That's a pretty cynical way to look at it. I would imagine that part of the lack of response is due to the fact that most traffic fatalities are not intentionally caused and are diffuse (many deaths across time and space instead of in one big incident in a small geographic area).

intopieces 8y ago

>Perhaps it's time to declare this a war to save the (potential) addicts and act accordingly. The Wars on Terror, Drugs and Poverty have all been abject failures. War is a terrible metaphor for this problem. War implies at least some semblance of a defined enemy. The issues here are interconnected and require nuanced discussion and debate. Simply calling it a war will not get the people of Seattle that.