4 ms·

Most of the surge in "deaths of despair" can be chalked up to opioids being far more powerful. Fentanyl and OxyContin are your bogeymen, the rest of the causal

Most of the surge in "deaths of despair" can be chalked up to opioids being far more powerful. Fentanyl and OxyContin are your bogeymen, the rest of the causal speculation is window dressing. Not that we shouldn't want a more equitable society, but closing the coal mine didn't kill those hillbillies, Purdue Pharma did.

aspenmayer 6y ago
Let’s not take it for granted that there are many external factors that cause people to use substances. It’s not ideal that people are hurt. If they still had their jobs maybe their insurance would have covered addiction treatment. It would be more ideal if healthcare were disincorporated from employment. We should do better and not accept these harms as inevitable. They are upsetting and we should be stirred to right action to change the system.
- weeksie 6y ago
  People used drugs before.
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    Yeah, probably before society even existed. They likely always will and that’s okay too. What’s your point?
    - weeksie 6y ago
      My point is that pet social projects are fine, and I would absolutely agree that we need a more equitable society, but the root cause of these deaths is that the drugs people use right now are far, far more deadly than they were before the turn of the century. Change that, you change the surge in deaths. We deindustrialized in the 80s and 90s. The spike didn't start until 2000, just after OxyContin came out. That's your guy.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - grawprog 6y ago
        >far more deadly than they were before the turn of the century. The war in Afghanistan played a large part in this. Where do you think all the poppies came from to start mass producing oxycontin? https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-opium-poppy-production/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/... Not only prescription opioids but heroin became a big problem again right around the early 2000's. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/afghan-heroin-swamps-canadas-streets/article1079707/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/afghan-heroin-... >Until a few years ago, most heroin came from an opium-producing region in Southeast Asia called the "golden triangle," a mountainous area of around 350,000 square kilometres overlapping Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. >Roughly 92 per cent of the world's heroin comes from opium poppies grown in Afghanistan, according to the 2007 World Drug Report, released in June by the United Nations Office on Drugs. >Afghan heroin typically flows into Canada through two main trafficking arteries, Mr. Nadeau said: via the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then onto India and, finally, Canada; and, from Afghanistan to western Africa, then through the United States into Canada. The one thing the Taliban was actually pretty good about was getting rid of the poppy fields. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0955395904000945 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09553...
        weeksie 6y ago
        It's the synthetic stuff that's the problem. It's all bad, but this is directly related to Fentanyl and OxyContin. Oxies brought opiates to the suburbs and Fentanyl is what ends up killing you b/c it's in all the "normal" heroin these days. The cycle is: get hurt, get prescribed oxies. Either you or your kids or whoever gets addicted. The prescription runs out or you run out of money and you switch to heroin, which I can assure you, was widely available before the Afghan war. What makes it so deadly now is that it's frequently cut with Fent. Fentanyl is far easier to smuggle because it's _so_ much more potent than other opiates. Buy a bunch of precursor from China, smuggle a few kilos over the southern border, bam. In any case, the poppy supply was not the limiting factor on production of prescription opioids. There are two developments that have driven this crisis: prescription opioids and fentanyl.
guscost 6y ago
Also why the government claimed that cartels are “taking advantage” of the shutdown to smuggle drugs, probably complete bullshit and the real truth is they are running operations because they don’t want to see eye-popping numbers of overdose deaths among bored/depressed quarantinees in the next few years.
skillpass 6y ago
This is explicitly refuted in the article. > In an early 2018 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Christopher J. Ruhm, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Virginia, suggested that "the ‘deaths of despair’ framing, while provocative, is unlikely to explain the main sources of the fatal drug epidemic." He continued: "The fatal overdose epidemic is likely to primarily reflect drug problems rather than deaths of despair." Case and Deaton responded that they had explicitly tested and rejected his hypothesis, and that in their work "despair" was meant to be "a label, not an explanation."
- weeksie 6y ago
  I know they're claiming to refute that hypothesis but I do not agree with them.

aspenmayer 6y ago

Let’s not take it for granted that there are many external factors that cause people to use substances. It’s not ideal that people are hurt. If they still had their jobs maybe their insurance would have covered addiction treatment. It would be more ideal if healthcare were disincorporated from employment. We should do better and not accept these harms as inevitable. They are upsetting and we should be stirred to right action to change the system.

weeksie 6y ago
People used drugs before.
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  Yeah, probably before society even existed. They likely always will and that’s okay too. What’s your point?
  - weeksie 6y ago
    My point is that pet social projects are fine, and I would absolutely agree that we need a more equitable society, but the root cause of these deaths is that the drugs people use right now are far, far more deadly than they were before the turn of the century. Change that, you change the surge in deaths. We deindustrialized in the 80s and 90s. The spike didn't start until 2000, just after OxyContin came out. That's your guy.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - grawprog 6y ago
      >far more deadly than they were before the turn of the century. The war in Afghanistan played a large part in this. Where do you think all the poppies came from to start mass producing oxycontin? https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-opium-poppy-production/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/... Not only prescription opioids but heroin became a big problem again right around the early 2000's. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/afghan-heroin-swamps-canadas-streets/article1079707/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/afghan-heroin-... >Until a few years ago, most heroin came from an opium-producing region in Southeast Asia called the "golden triangle," a mountainous area of around 350,000 square kilometres overlapping Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. >Roughly 92 per cent of the world's heroin comes from opium poppies grown in Afghanistan, according to the 2007 World Drug Report, released in June by the United Nations Office on Drugs. >Afghan heroin typically flows into Canada through two main trafficking arteries, Mr. Nadeau said: via the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then onto India and, finally, Canada; and, from Afghanistan to western Africa, then through the United States into Canada. The one thing the Taliban was actually pretty good about was getting rid of the poppy fields. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0955395904000945 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09553...
      - weeksie 6y ago
        It's the synthetic stuff that's the problem. It's all bad, but this is directly related to Fentanyl and OxyContin. Oxies brought opiates to the suburbs and Fentanyl is what ends up killing you b/c it's in all the "normal" heroin these days. The cycle is: get hurt, get prescribed oxies. Either you or your kids or whoever gets addicted. The prescription runs out or you run out of money and you switch to heroin, which I can assure you, was widely available before the Afghan war. What makes it so deadly now is that it's frequently cut with Fent. Fentanyl is far easier to smuggle because it's _so_ much more potent than other opiates. Buy a bunch of precursor from China, smuggle a few kilos over the southern border, bam. In any case, the poppy supply was not the limiting factor on production of prescription opioids. There are two developments that have driven this crisis: prescription opioids and fentanyl.

guscost 6y ago

Also why the government claimed that cartels are “taking advantage” of the shutdown to smuggle drugs, probably complete bullshit and the real truth is they are running operations because they don’t want to see eye-popping numbers of overdose deaths among bored/depressed quarantinees in the next few years.

skillpass 6y ago

This is explicitly refuted in the article. > In an early 2018 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Christopher J. Ruhm, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Virginia, suggested that "the ‘deaths of despair’ framing, while provocative, is unlikely to explain the main sources of the fatal drug epidemic." He continued: "The fatal overdose epidemic is likely to primarily reflect drug problems rather than deaths of despair." Case and Deaton responded that they had explicitly tested and rejected his hypothesis, and that in their work "despair" was meant to be "a label, not an explanation."

weeksie 6y ago
I know they're claiming to refute that hypothesis but I do not agree with them.