Just say no

I just finished reading Dopesick, by Beth Macy. You don ' t need to take my word that it ' s worth your while, the book was a huge bestseller.  However, it does have a fairly narrow focus. It tells the story of the opioid epidemic largely within the confines of a region of rural Virginia, but this is a disaster of national scope that manifests somewhat differently in different places. Here ' s the really sad news:  source:U.S. Department of Health and Human Services I know it ' s a little small but you can see it full size if you click the link. The short version of the story is that deaths from opioid overdoses were mostly from prescription drugs in 1999, and became a growing problem, claiming more than 15,000 lives in 2011. But then deaths from prescription opioids more or less leveled off and in 2014, while deaths from synthetic illicit opioids started to shoot up almost vertically, reaching more than 70,000 by 2021. The one thing that ' s a bit disappointing about Macy ' s book is that it focuses on the specific social setting which is the main reason why people started to pay attention to this in the first place. The U.S. has had a heroin problem for as long as I ' ve been alive. While it ' s a myth that it was largely confined to non-white people (viz. William S. Buroughs and  Drug Store Cowboy, and I ' ve known plenty of white junkies) it was a mostly urban problem. What people suddenly noticed was that opioid addiction was afflicting " re...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs