Posted on 03/08/2018 7:47:53 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
By now, most have heard about the deadly opioid epidemic that has struck our nation.
According to data compiled in a Kaiser Family Foundation report, there were 42,249 casualties in 2016 related to opioids. This is double the 21,089 reported in 2010.
For a little perspective, given all the attention guns are getting these days, per the FBI, in 2015 there were 13,455 murders, 9,616 committed with firearms.
What is driving this opioid crisis?
According to a recent report about opioids by the Social Capital Project, organized in the U.S. Senate, “the oversupply and abuse of legal prescription pain relievers is at the heart of the crisis.”
This has led to action in Washington with legislation such as the Opioid Addiction Prevention Act, which would impose limits on opioid painkiller prescriptions.
However, Dr. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and lecturer at Yale University School of Medicine and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., challenges this picture, which she calls “a false narrative.”
According to Satel, data show “that only a minority of people who are prescribed opioids for pain become addicted to them, and those who do become addicted and who die from painkiller overdoses tend to obtain these medications from sources other than their own physicians.
Within the past several years, overdose deaths are overwhelmingly attributable not to prescription opioids but to illicit fentanyl and heroin. These ‘street opioids’ have become the engine of the opioid crisis in its current, and most lethal form.”
Satel acknowledges the problem of overprescribed opioid painkillers being diverted to people other than the intended patient, but she doesn’t see this as the core of today’s crisis.
Furthermore, we don’t want to get into a situation where doctors are intimidated from prescribing, or prevented from prescribing, painkillers that are justifiably needed.
I believe Satel zeroes in on the real heart of the crisis when she says, “What we need is demand-side policy. Interventions that seek to reduce the desire to use drugs, be they painkillers, or illicit opioids.”
Here, I see an interesting parallel to the gun debate.
That is, the center of the deadly problem is with the disturbed user or perpetrator, rather than with the instrument—whether it is a gun or a drug. The instrument is the result rather than the cause.
The first impulse, particularly in a highly materialistic and secular culture like ours, is to see the problem in the thing rather than the person, because that’s the easiest approach.
Looking at the demographics of the opioid crisis, a number of flashing lights emerge.
First, the perpetrators are disproportionately men (another parallel with the gun issue). Of the 42,249 opioid-related deaths in 2016, 67 percent were men.
Also, as reported by the Social Capital Project, opioid casualties are disproportionately not married. In 2015, “never married and divorced individuals made up about 32 percent of the population but accounted for 71 percent of all opioid overdose deaths.”
And opioid casualties appear disproportionately among the least educated. In 2015, “40 percent had no more than a high school diploma or equivalent, but they accounted for 68 percent of all opioid overdose deaths.”
As policymakers in Washington and in state and local governments attempt to address this opioid crisis, looking to the usual policy tools like government programs and government spending, I think it’s worth considering that what we’re seeing may reflect a spiritual, cultural crisis.
There’s a price to be paid when a society forsakes the spiritual for the purely material and when traditional institutions such as marriage and family are abandoned. It could be that as family and marriage break down, the first victims of this abandonment of spirit and tradition are our young men.
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Sharing medication with friends or family members isn’t what started this problem, nor is it why it continues.
Medicine cabinets containing pain medications have been around for decades. So, ask yourself, why now?
Lets say a bullet manufacturer designed a bullet and markets it as being far more likely to kill good guys than bad guys. Then let’s say the government says “Great, we will give your company 1 billion tax dollars to distribute these bullets to our citizens”. And then lets say it turns out that after these bullets are fired and hit a bad guy, they shoot straight up into the air only to come down an hour or two later and kill the shooter...
I would say it was entirely appropriate to look into not only the sale of these bullets but especially the government endorsement and funding of these bullets.
***Whoops....I meant more bad guys than good guys.
“Bottom line, heroin has been around for a long, long time and never got to epidemic status until after a 20 year flood of “safe” and legal Oxycontin into our communities.”
However, your note over-simplifies a serious problem and it is unfortunately untrue. I encourage reading up on heroin use and its history in the U.S. as well as the current issues with fentanyl/car-fentanyl importation and smuggling, and also refer to what, specifically, is killing people and why heroin and fentanyl use has paralleled the rising death rate.
People who tell you that they are spike junkies because a Dr prescribed them pain killers and that led to china/fentanyl use are lying.
Apologies, but Oxy? That hasn’t been a mainstream problem since the early 2000’s? You need to look into snorting Neurontin, Hydros, Roxys, etc and get caught up on the current Rx meds.
My bottom line is that the public is being misled by the same liberal media they distrust on every other issue so that the public will blame Doctors and Pharm companies for a reason created by liberalism itself. It is a blame deflection issue.
Respectfully.
It indisputable that tons and tons of kids are starting out their opiate addiction by taking pills. I have a high schooler who confirms pill use at his school is wide spread. Whether these pills came from a personal prescription or they came from a town in West Virginia with a population of 3000 where 2,000,000 pills are shipped in each year, I don't know. My bottom line is that these things are dangerous. There are doctors who are willing to write dirty scripts and the drug companies are more than willing to ship as much of their poison as someone will pay for. And the worst part is that we are all funding it.
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