Posted on 08/06/2017 10:41:29 PM PDT by Timpanagos1
Beth Genslinger doesn’t fit the stereotype of a victim of a drug epidemic. She thoughtfully sets out glasses of water for her guests before they arrive and wears a teacher’s warm, open smile: She retired from Valley View Junior High right before her granddaughter was born, after 33 years of teaching. Her husband was an insurance agent and, to his children’s friends, a formidable breakfast chef.
Their son, Andy, died of a heroin overdose in October 2015. The same thing happened to his cousin Daniel Weidle less than three months later, the day after Christmas. A third cousin had died after a battle with opioids in 2005.
The Genslingers live in Germantown, Ohio, a close-knit country community nine miles north of Middletown on Ohio State Route 4. The median family income here exceeds $50,000; less than 6 percent of the population is under the poverty line. These houses have porches, and their porches have flags. Beth grew up here. Her parents live right next door; they have now lost three grandchildren. The family is what a neighbor calls “preeminent” in the community.
The opioid epidemic does not discriminate. Unlike crack or meth, there is no single cultural profile. National statistics suggest that more men than women use, and the demographic is largely white. But the rich are affected almost as much as the poor, those with college degrees alongside high school dropouts.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
“With every phenomenon, there is a distribution. Some areas will be more effected early than others. Just their bad luck. But it all evens out, over time.”
It’s not bad luck that one gets addicted to crack cocaine or gets addicted to heroin, it’s bad decisions. Furthermore, geographic and economic distributions of drug use does not even out as the crack epidemic of the 1980’s-1990’s primarily was contained within the black urban underclass.
As for time, time has demonstrated that while crack/addiction is down, the use and addition rates for opioids has increased.
“38% of adult Americans have an opoid prescription! THAT is the culture that needs to change. Street drugs will always exist, always have, but what is new is the government pushing these things on the population en masse.”
The communities in our nation that were infested with the crack cocaine epidemic have changed and have decreased consumption of crack.
So yes, people can change as can cultures.
Now, what can the people of Ohio and West Virginia lean from places like Detroit, New York and Philadelphia regarding ways to stem a drug epidemic?
You are conflating the broad trend with the individual failure.
My point was that this heroin problem is already in Texas, and you will catch up with Ohio, soon enough.
Experience suggests that heroin use effects a much wider swath of the population than crack cocaine. This problem is not confined to the cities.
[ ALSO, Oxy was originally ONLY for cancer patients but then the powers that be got greased enough to make basically synthetic heroin available for EVERYONE.
You unknowingly take a brutally addictive drug, then get addicted, then years later, when congress, only because they’re afraid of losing their jobs, makes it near impossible to get oxy, you turn to heroin, which is MUCH cheaper and easier to get. ]
Off label usage basically turned this into a epidemic.
“You are an evil person and tyranny is in your blood. You are the enemy - go away.”
No tyranny with me, instead just the opposite.
In the 1980’s-1990’s people in underclass urban areas had the freedom to become crack junkies and over the last 20 years, crack use has decreased in those communities.
They did something right.
Today, people in other economic and geographic areas are seeing opioid addiction increase in their communities.
There must be something they can do right to fight the opioid epidemic.
It pisses me off to no end that we are using blood and treasure to GUARD OPIUM FIELDS IN AFGHANISTAN......
We could at the very least be raising the crap domestically and cutting the crazy jihadis out of the profits and that would at least help the war or terror...
Instead we took the w3ar on terror and turned it into a even more dangerous Narco-War where the profits from the Opium are working against the goals of the war on terror.
It was bad enough with the Saudis taking their oil monies and dumping them into hands of Wahhabi extremists, but now we have given another income source to the crazy ass jihadis...
We have better ways to deal with pain these days but in the meantime, we have created a bunch of addicts by prescribing Oxy for everything. When they cracked down on the Oxy, people went to heroin. Then they laced the heroin with something that killed people.
Some people will walk away from opioid addiction and some will die from it.
Texas, a fer overseas locations and right now a swamp a half mile to my west, a marsh a couple hundred yards to my east and coastal wetlands to the south. Salt water and fresh water fishing under my feet.
“We have better ways to deal with pain these days but in the meantime, we have created a bunch of addicts....”
The addicts created themselves.
“How do you propose we modify the culture of Appalachia in order to bring opioid deaths under control, and who will be in charge of modifying it?”
Maybe the very same ways the culture of urban areas was modified to stem the crack epidemic.
“It’s them deplorable bourgeois types and their lack of self control obviously. They love to preach their family values but really they’re hypocrites. They’d rather build a wall than face the failure of their own character. Trump’s wall is pointless as long as red voting crackers create demand for the junk.”
The needle and the damage done not give a damn about the fancy french words you learned in sociology class, family values, a wall, or who is in the White House.
Technically but someone almost always prescribed the drugs initially. Apparently, we created a very effective medicine for getting addicted. We started to get “Pain Clinics” popping up in the area a few years back. They appeared in the poorest counties in the area. I know one of the Drs and she went to prison for forging scripts.
Having exactly zero experience with opioids or cocaine, it is my understanding that the addictive properties of the two classes of drug are very different, and that the addictive properties of opioids make them much more difficult to quit.
I could be wrong on that, but this is my understanding.
Not all substances have the same additive qualities, but we all have the same ability to “Just Say No!”
I am going to be in Southern Illinois in a rural area next week, and I was scoping things out using Google Street View. The town I am going to has a pain medication or a recovery center on every block, or so it seems.
I was thinking Mayberry, but it looks like I’m headed to someplace considerably less appealing.
“Not all substances have the same additive qualities, but we all have the same ability to “Just Say No!”
How clever.
.
One thing about this eclipse next week is that it is going to get a lot of urban and suburban types out of their protective bubbles and get them out rubbing elbows with rural America.
It could be an interesting day.
That’s working for me, so far.
It’s not working for everybody, obviously.
“Took me 4 years to pay off. He is drug free, so yay for that. In a perfect world he’d give me $4000, but I will settle for a drug free little brother.”
I lost a brother to drugs, alcohol and damn near had to kill my best friend to keep him from killing himself.
Now I understand. You are a non-recovered 80s era War on Drugs brainwashing victim.
Let me give you a pro tip: stop making an incredible, public fool out of yourself. Pouring out ignorant opinion after ignorant opinion, very obviously having no experience or context whatsoever besides what was drilled into your head with endless government commercials, is a running embarrassment to this site.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.