Posted on 04/27/2014 4:45:59 PM PDT by mgist
HP: Many people don’t realize that overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in the U.S. I gave a talk about five years ago in Chicago, and I mentioned that we had more overdose deaths than traffic fatalities. My audience literally did not believe me. People were absolutely convinced that I had mis-transcribed the numbers. Every year, America loses a little over 32,000 people in auto crashes, and something like 38,000 from overdose deaths annually.
KH: Yeah, it’s remarkable if you compare overdoses to AIDS, which at its peak was taking about the same number of lives. The difference in reaction is really startling. We appropriately became galvanized about HIV/AIDS, and implemented much better public policy to prevent HIV-related deaths. It’s much harder to get traction on the overdose issue, or even to get people to believe how prevalent the problem actually is.
…
HP: Just to note the numbers, in 1999 there were about 4,000 prescription opiate overdoses. In 2010, there were about 16,000. By comparison, there are about 10,000 gun homicides in the United States.
KH: It is pretty amazing. Many people are focusing on the return of heroin and saying, “It’s all the fault of criminals.” You’ve got to remember, 4 in 5 of people today who start using heroin began their opioid addiction on prescription opioids. The responsibility doesn’t start today with the stereotypical criminal street dealer. We basically created this problem with legally manufactured drugs that were legally prescribed. This really flies in the face of the argument that if we just had a flow of legal drugs, the harms would be minimal.
…
HP: Can I ask you an embarrassingly basic question? If someone like Philip Seymour Hoffman presumably had access to all sorts of prescription opioids, why does he end up injecting heroin?
KH: That’s actually a good question. Cost drives many people to heroin. It’s more expensive to buy oxycodone than it is to buy heroin. Presumably that was a less pressing concern for Mr. Hoffman. Perhaps the intensity of the rush of injected heroin was more reinforcing to him than opioid medications were. The prescription medications have a longer, slower cycle of action in the body. His heroin use could also be the result of habit. He had experienced a heroin problem before, many years ago. It could be that that was the drug that he knew best or was available in the networks of dealers he used. I’m speculating about somebody I don’t know, but those are some possible reasons.
For most people it’s cost. Add one other thing; when people lose their health insurance, they may need the opioids to manage their pain. People sometimes end up buying street drugs including heroin to manage their pain because they have lost the insurance that used to cover their pain.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/07/09/070709fa_fact_anderson?currentPage=all
Regardless of your concern for the victims of this government supported onslought of heroin in the market, terrorists are benifiting from the misery(or weakness) of American children. We will all pay a heavy price for this.
Good luck to the inocent children you love.
Well talk about doubling down on nasty, you made a big ASSumption about our lives and how we raised our child, didn’t you? Feel justified now that his death was our fault and his life was no great loss to society?
I hope you kid learned compassion from someone because it isn’t something it seems like you could model
God Bless
and may your beloved child never make a bad decision that costs them their life and have someone blame your parenting for it
The Real Winner of the Afghan War Is This Shady Military Contractor
by Jacob SiegelApr 24, 2014 6:13 am EDT
The State Department paid out $4 billion to rebuild Afghanistan. Some $2.5 billion of that went to a single firm with a bad, bad past.
Do you also feel a tinge of relief when a 16 year drives too fast and wraps himself around a tree? After all, we warn them, don’t we? They KNOW it’s dangerous
Just one less bad driver around, right?
After all, good teenager always listen to all the advice we give them and those that don’t, well, no great loss, they have it coming
I can still hear my sons voice: “I know, I know, I’m not stupid Mom!”
No son, you were not stupid
but you were overconfident in your ability to handle something we warned you against, something that is becoming upper and middle class mainline and far more common than many folks can contemplate until it smack them in the jaw
Geez, what an abnormal teenage behavior.
And now that he’s dead, people like you are relieved?
Karma, baby- I believe in it and it is a small grim comfort
I’m sorry, I put it as gently as I could. But both my father and my sister also wanted to experiment with drugs. One died and the other lived. My opinion stands.
thanks, I wish my son had been lucky
I hope you get to become a grandparent someday, what a blessing
as does mine
the rising teen drug death rate must bring you a lot of relief
too bad you have to stifle saying it to some family’s face
or maybe you do
You’ll never know.
Thank you.
Is this the main reason we're still in Afghanistan?
A Federal government acting to "protect citizens" from psychological ailments has helped foster a medical and education establishment that pushes prescription drugs on kids as "treatment" for being human. In terms of illegal recreational drugs, kids experiment and goof up and learn from those mistakes and giving in to temptation. It is purely a moral journey. Government is AMORAL. The Federal government has zero role in medicine.
The Federal government's job is MINIMAL. The Church's job, morality's job, is to provide pathways out of addiction and despair.
AMEN BROTHER FREEPER.
I took what you said about your lives at face value.
I served in the military for over a decade.
I know the hours.
I know the likelihood of unaccompanied tours.
I personally made sure those things were not something my child had to endure when he needed real live parents who were there for him.
I went out and worked a job making less money than I could have made. But I was home a lot. We did with only one car and lived in a small house...so my child had an actual parent who loved him there all the time.
These were choices I and my wife made. They came with sacrifice of material things.
Explain to me again about my lack of compassion, and the compassion you modeled for your child.
You made a jerk of yourself talking about ASSuming.
I didn’t say every addict was better off dead or that I wished they all would die. I have made clear, however, that many of them are both incorrigible and criminal apart from being stoned. These leave behind a safer world when they depart.
I am glad for you that your early life was not marred by daily exposure to violent crime. Your relatively safe upbringing allows you to feel a moral superiority to those who take a dim view of the criminal element brought on by bitter experience. You aren’t righteous, however, merely self righteous.
Shove them in the “Bum-trix” and give them all the simulated smack they could ever want...
Bum-trix = “The Matrix”...
If their soul is forgiven death very well could be the cure. So many addicts take entire families with them on their journey through self destruction. Some, as in the case of drunk drivers, can take out people they never new. Sad to contemplate.
edd, you lost your righteousness by making a cruel comment and sticking to it, and ASSUMING that YOUR child never made a bad (fatal) decision because your wife stayed home to raise him
And you ASSume that I did not “love my child” enough to do the same
You also ASSume my early life was safe. I’m going to reveal to you that I and my brothers were raised in gentle poverty (on social security and part time nursing wages) by a 33 year old pregnant widow left behind when an Air Force pilot chose to steer his crippled jet into a swamp rather than bail put over a city.
Perhaps that poverty and abandonment (noble as it was, it was a decision to choose others over me to save someone else) and realizing how my mother struggled that gave me an insecurity that led me to stay in a career long enough to earn a pension of my own. But it did leave me with the decision to make career ending choices in favor of family stability and do an early exit when our son was a quite young happy healthy child of 10, and be a stay at home mother to him for the last 10 years of his life
When I could not be with him he never spent a day in childcare center but with a wonderful grandmother who loved my son and vice versa. He came to her after he died and told her how sorry he was to leave me, but he was OK and with my Dad.
God Bless
And at least half are prescribed opiates when it is unnecessary. Doctors get perks under the table to give out these drugs. Then taxpayers pay for these people to sit home and pop pills.
Big Parma is the largest dope dealer on Earth
1. I never claimed I was righteous. Just that I am capable of exhibiting compassion. I was there for my child starting from the end of the Gulf war. I didn’t wait until my child was ten. Getting a pension wasn’t an equivalent priority.
2. The statement was not about your poverty or lack thereof. It was specifically about your exposure to violent crime.
You seem to think that means money. For the record, I am talking about beatings, rape, and murder. You know. Actual violence.
Your personal position, which you have staked out on this thread and doggedly defended is that children who grow up with that are not allowed to equate what inebriated violent people in their childhood did with the substances that smelled bad and intoxicated them.
In fact, you are insisting that if children whose lives were regularly marred in that way don’t miss similar people when they die, then those children all grown up are attacking you personally.
There are not two ways to parse this.
You took my statement at the beginning of this thread and made it all about you. All about your feelings.
Everything isn’t all about your feelings and a lot of addicts do really really bad things. And it is okay if the people who they do those things around or
to don’t think its a loss when people like them bring about their own demise.
Some people become chemically addicted very easily and it is no longer a choice. The brain can no longer think clearly and turns every action into an effort to obtain that drug. It is impossible to understand unless you survived chemical addiction.
Nomatter what the consequences are, these people will not see them. They don't care about their children or even themselves rotting away (see Krokodil). They will keep abusing the drugs until they die unless someone physically intervenes on their behalf.
I agree that some people are more susceptible but they can stop. It’s just a matter of deciding to do it. The problem comes when they treat themselves as a victim. They say they want to quit but they “can’t”.
If you lock them up for 30 days, they will prove to themselves and others that they can quit. But many will choose to return to the slavery they swore they couldn’t quit.
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