7 ms·
American life expectancy is now at its lowest in nearly two decades
- tw1984 4y agothe whole Fentanyl issue is easy to solve - death penalty for those who sell more than 50g of Fentanyl.
- brianwawok 4y agoIs that the kind of country you want to live in? Say you make a cop mad and he plants 51g on you. Dead? That’s cool?
- tw1984 4y agohave 51g of drugs is very very different from selling 51g to someone.
- lvass 4y agoIf a cop wants you dead so bad he's willing to throw something I presume is worth millions aside for it, such law is the least of your problems.
- tw1984 4y ago50g of fentanyl has a street price tag of $5-10k USD. that itself is another problem. if the system can make it extremely risky to sell such deadly drugs, its price will have to go up significantly, forcing many many people to stop abusing it. you won't see that many fentanyl deaths if it costs say $10k per gram on the street. sadly, it is dirt cheap now, at only $100-200 per gram, people are dying.
- ben7799 4y agoYou realize that's enough to kill about 25,000 people, right? The penalties are already pretty big for selling just a few lethal doses.. having 50g+ is enough to blight an entire region.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- paulcole 4y agoThis reminds me of a West Wing quote: > Oh, well then you're just as naive as these guys who think that capital punishment is going to be a deterrent for drug kingpins. As if drug kingpins didn't live their day-to-day lives under the possibility of execution Where is 50g of fentanyl even being sold? That’s a huge amount. Would this be a deterrent for sellers in China or other countries outside of the US?
- tw1984 4y ago> As if drug kingpins didn't live their day-to-day lives under the possibility of execution the question is how to make sure all sellers, not just kingpins, would be living under the possibility of execution. > Would this be a deterrent for sellers in China or other countries outside of the US? yes. that worked pretty well.
- paulcole 4y ago> yes. that worked pretty well. Did it? If so, where is the fentanyl in the US being manufactured and sold into the US from?
- tw1984 4y agoMexico. See the house.gov source below. https://republicans-energycommerce.house.gov/news/blog/the-fentanyl-crisis-in-america-is-getting-worse https://republicans-energycommerce.house.gov/news/blog/the-f...
- paulcole 4y agoIf it worked “pretty well” (your words) there then why is so much fentanyl still making it into the US?
- tw1984 4y agofentanyl or not, there is a serious drug abuse issue or let's say culture in the US. with the current US laws and situations, you can take fentanyl away from streets, but that won't end your drug abuse problem in the US. rather than blaming others for all these problems, maybe it is time to clean up the mess from within.
- Ekaros 4y agoJust make it legal and regulated.
- agentwiggles 4y agoI'm generally in favor of this with regards to all drugs, but I do hesitate when it comes to fentanyl. It's probably not a purely rational, consistent-with-my-priors feeling - but I still have to wonder if legal fentanyl would be a net good for people. The addictiveness and lethality might justify prohibition of high-test opioids, in a way that we certainly _can't_ justify for marijuana, mushrooms, and other reasonably benign drugs.
- Ekaros 4y agoSurely we could only allow selling of prediluted version. At such level that overdosing would be rarer. Not that you can't overdose on many other things if you miss use them. Main problem I currently see is the quality control and variances between what is being sold. But if the stuff was pharmaceutical quality and uniform there would be less issues in that regard. Also it would be pure, which I think would allow there to be less issues.
- agentwiggles 4y agoDefinitely true, that's one of the biggest arguments in favor of legalization - that doses could be standardized and that variance would claim less lives. Either way, something tells me this will be a moot point for the foreseeable future. We're still laboring under the stupidity of marijuana prohibition in almost half the country.
- hackeraccount 4y agoWould you take a job selling fentanyl? If so, than don't you realize that you're making a living on people's misery? That you're not just hurting them but yourself as well? I think the parent's idea of the death penalty is (Sorry parent) dumb but I don't think that means we should act like there's nothing wrong here.
- karp773 4y agoIn its time, China had to resort to executing drug dealers and labor camps for the users (which constituted ~20% of the popilation) to kick its opium habit. A heavy price to say the least. By all accounts, fentanyl is more addictive and potent drug than opium. The conclusion is obvious: the price for America to kick its fentanyl habit will be even higher. It's a matter of time. :(
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- mensetmanusman 4y ago78.8 to 77.3 Is this a surprise when a novel corona virus runs through town?
- _0w8t 4y agoGiven that life expectancy in other contries continues to increase one cannot put all the blame on corona virus alone.
- prottog 4y agoVery few countries had their life expectancy increase during Covid. Most fell.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoThis is probably more about the drug use epidemic and the increase in suicides. A teenager dying has a much larger impact on life expectancy than a 75 year old (around the median COVID death age).
- s1artibartfast 4y agoSuicide is also a factor I believe. Suicide was the second leading cause of death for people ages 10-14 and 25-34
- fulafel 4y agoAs a benchmark, in EU the drop was significantly lower: https://www.statista.com/chart/27390/annual-change-in-life-expectancy-europe/ https://www.statista.com/chart/27390/annual-change-in-life-e...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fgsdgfsdgfsdgfs 4y agoAverage age of a coronavirus death is over 80
- pcdoodle 4y ago14 days to slow the spread.
- brink 4y agoYou're down-voted, but you have a valid point. The cost was much higher than just time. Depression, addiction, lack of exercise, general happiness all took a tumble and they all had a large and disregarded cost. And people at the top of this thread are still suggesting that it was the Covid virus that directly caused this.
- bpanon 4y agoThe world is a business, Mr Beale.
- agentwiggles 4y ago> The two reports, released by the CDC on Thursday, show deaths from COVID-19 and drug overdoses, most notably synthetic opioids like fentanyl, were the primary drivers of the drop in life expectancy. Not entirely surprising wrt COVID. The drug overdose deaths are a sad situation. I remember first hearing about the epidemic of ODs a couple of years back. There is a bit of a common theme between this article and the other current article about the planned obsolence and inherent crappiness of most modern products. (This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092749). I have noticed this gloomy attitude from many people my age, a sort of existential despair and belief that we sit somewhere near the end of the world as we know it. I don't personally share this belief (maybe just out of stubborn naivete and optimism), but I do understand why people feel it. The modern media seems to love these kinds of stories, and there's always some crisis being pushed between global warming, economic woes, and the rise of some fairly troubling and extreme candidates in American politics. Not sure what my point is here, but there's definitely a contingent of young folks (late millenial to gen-z seems to be the main demographic) who seem to have lost hope in the future. I hope we can find our way to a more hopeful collective spirit. One last comment on this already rambling post: when I recently watched Apollo 11 I was quite moved by the spirit pervading the whole enterprise - this idea that we sent people to the moon with hopes for the whole world. That everyone was watching, hoping, praying for the success of the mission. That is a sort of unity that is awfully hard to find today.
- prottog 4y ago> That is a sort of unity that is awfully hard to find today. We sacrificed that sort of unity -- for exactly what I still don't understand, but sacrificed it nonetheless. For a misguided sense of diversity, perhaps? American society can no longer even agree that working hard and being punctual are virtues, with a not-insignificant minority describing those characteristics as white supremacist. More broadly, as Kemi Badenoch of England put it eloquently, there is a loss of epistemic authority in the modern West, maybe especially in the Anglosphere. When people no longer believe that anything can be true, there can be no rallying cause around which we form a sense of unity.
- 4y ago
- mcs5280 4y agoAnd yet the cost of healthcare continues to skyrocket
- hackeraccount 4y agoYeah but none of this has anything to do with healthcare as it's popularly understood. If you take drug overdoses, suicide and maybe homicide out then things don't look that bad. This isn't any of the things that people complain about when they say healthcare is too expensive. No doctor is going to convince me not to like getting high so much that I'll take a chance on dying for it or that when I say I could just kill a man I'm not singing along with Rage Against The Machine. Anti-depressive drugs are in theory wonderful but I'm unconvinced (and please someone, convince me I am wrong) that the suicide rate wouldn't be up if more people were taking them.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI'm not sure why anyone would think that a less healthy population would reduce the cost of healthcare.
- jeanlucneptune 4y agoSure I'll give COVID and drug ODs their due in knocking down our overall life expectancy, but if we don't address the impacts of late stage capitalism (late stage Reaganism), we're missing much of the story. Ask yourself: 1.) How many Americans STILL don't have access to healthcare? 2.) How many Americans who have access to healthcare underutilize because of cost? 3.) How many Americans working physical jobs are having their bodies destroyed because of lack of workplace protections? 4.) How many Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and have to make hard decisions every month about food? 5.) How many Americans live in isolation because our economy encourages a nomadic existence even (especially?) for high income workers? 6.) How many American children are raised without supervision because their parents are trying to scratch out an existence at low-wage jobs? 7.) How many American children are separated from a parent by incarceration? I could go on and on... Most Americans don't understand what they're living through because most Americans have no lived experience outside of our country. No country is perfect, and it's hard to compare the USA to other nations, but there are many countries (mostly in northern Europe) where the average person is much happier and much healthier than the typical American.
- unregistereddev 4y agoWhile these points can provide interesting debate, the actual data showed that COVID and drug ODs (particularly fentanyl) were the driving force behind the change. Your other points may be tangentially related at best, and likely unrelated.
- jeanlucneptune 4y agoWho do you think ODs on drugs? Just random people making bad choices? Obviously not. It's people who are losing hope, losing community, and losing themselves. Read "Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism" from respected economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190785/deaths-of-despair-and-the-future-of-capitalism https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190785/de...
- tdehnel 4y agoOh knock it off with the “late stage capitalism” crap please. You sound like a college sophomore. We are so close to the beginning of capitalism we have basically not even started. Standards of living have been steadily increasing since the enlightenment and will continue long into the future.