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This will probably get some play and is a bit of a different topic. Former CEO of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicicki son died of a drug freshman year of college at Cal.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/former-youtube-ceos-son-found-dead-uc-berkeley-rcna139355
The obvious implications is he took something laced with fentanyl. Culture war wise concerns about fentanyl are red coded though issues with fentanyl seem apparent in both red and blue states and people.
Overall I feel like this issue has lost its place in the news cycle. A quick google overdose deaths topped 112k in 2023 an all-time record. I am seeing a current U.S. population of 334 million. So to put this in perspective 112k multiplied by an average lifespan of 80 years is like 9 million deaths. Or close to 3% of US population at current rates will die by a drug overdose. I think I can fairly say it’s a huge issue even if you disagree with how I’m calculating the average persons risks of OD at around 3% in their lifetime.
Quick analysis of the kid he looks in shape for a 19 year old and was majoring in math so he’s the dream of any parent. Odd thing is he was found unresponsive at 4:23 pm on a Tuesday. That is going to be weird and details will come out as that time frame is more of an addict death. Versus I expected a weekend OD and he did some fentanyl laced coke/Molly during the weekend.
From people I’ve talked to opioids are amazing. I do not know if I’ve ever done them. They have to be if people do them. I’ve done molly/coke/mushrooms in the past. The big thing to me is I’m paranoid I’m doing something laced now and have largely cut out doing anything now.
The midtwit take is that dealers either sell both and cross contaminate or lace other drugs to get people addicted. Personally opinion and perhaps a difference without a difference is it’s probably lacing just so people say it’s the good shit.
Sorry for their loss.
Culture war issues
Plays into the immigration debate of not controlling the border
Blue states seem to be adopting a let it happen and treat but it doesn’t seem to be working
War on drug topics. I don’t think the old war on drugs ever dealt with the death rate we have now but war on drugs doesn’t seem stupid when it’s a 3% population level lifetime death rate which is far higher than COVID and killing people with high life expectancy
Other policy considerations. Some would say things like legalize drugs to kill fentanyl and people get “safe” drugs. Some conservative arguments that something’s should just be illegal. Opioids probably are fantastic but the death rate for someone who tries opioids seems extremely high.
My numeracy tells me this is a big problem and I believe an order of magnitude bigger problem than COVID. I don’t think it’s quite as hard coded in culture wars.
EDIT: Looks like I screwed up the math and chart stuff and it's all kind of weird. CDC says drug overdose is .32% of deaths, but that doesn't jive with their listed number of deaths in 2023, off by an order of magnitude. I'm wondering if deaths have more than one listed cause, or if some set of these numbers are projections or something.
As to why we won't talk about this more: We've talked about the opioid epidemic a lot, which is what this stat is about. 20% of opioid deaths are on prescription meds, and as far as I can tell the large majority of fentanyl users started with prescription opioids and then switched to fentanyl when they could no longer obtain/afford their growing addiction to prescribed meds.
Basically, you can't solve this problem without majorly overhauling the US healthcare system, which is a political quagmire that has been swallowing careers and movements whole for decades (Hillary Clinton started her political life as First Lady pushing for healthcare reform, and it didn't accomplish any more then than it has now).
Sure, you can imagine a world where you lock down the borders enough to stop all imported fentanyl (although the link to immigration is an obvious misdirect, imported drugs tend to come over sea borders and ports not the Mexican land border, and the programs to find caravans of people vs suitcases of drugs are completely different). But we import it because that's cheaper, not because it's the only way... US criminals are well capable of making their own fentanyl to sell if other supply lines close up.
You have to stop demand, which means fixing the prescription opioid epidemic, which means massively overhauling much of how we think about healthcare and the entire healthcare and insurance industries. That's disruptive, expensive, and politically difficult... not to mention opposed to the interests of a lot of rich capitalists. So, good luck on that.
I wish someone would explain what’s up with my math and 3% rate. My extrapolation feels right but something not jiving with the lower percent of deaths.
I don’t buy the prescription opioids to fentanyl theory but can’t prove it. Any user I know of (young people) don’t have any reason for pain meds. Even someone I’m thinking of who did prescription meds was also just in the scene and doing both. If anything it would feel like an adderall as a kid to party scene pipeline.
“People who overdose on drugs don’t have long lifespans” - obviously because they died from an overdose. Absent substance abuse a 24 year old drug overdose would have lived to old age. There isn’t an underlying medical condition that would have killed them young absent.
I’m not sure what health care reform has to do with substance abuse. Data I have seen already have Americans doing more prescription drugs so better health insurance/single payer and more money spent on health care wouldn’t seem to shrink the amount of pharmaceuticals American are using. Now if you meant targeted reform like stricter limits on prescribing then it would likely do some good.
PO->fentanyl pipeline I was getting mostly from personal observations plus common sense, but also backed by this paper. Though that paper isn't only about fentanyl so maybe it's not a strict majority for fentanyl itself.
For healthcare I can imagine a variety of policies including stricter prescription control, but really I'm thinking about something bigger than that.
I suspect that a lot of things we prescribe long-term pain meds for could be treated with combinations of things like rehabilitative therapy, biofeedback therapy, various surgeries, personal trainers to maintain overall health, etc. And a lot of things that do need pain meds could be prevented from turning into a long-term addiction with close monitoring by a doctor or nurse to test whether patients still need the meds and help them taper off slowly while using exercise/rehabilitation to recover promptly.
(obviously not all chronic pain conditions are like that, but I wouldn't be surprised if 60% of long-term opioid cases could be resolved with something in these genres)
The problem is all of that takes expensive one-on-one care and treatment by a variety of professionals, as well as some type of personal relationship with medical providers where they remember your name and your issues and are forming and executing long-term plans to work through them with you, and all of that is both more expensive than pills and not the way the system wants to be designed. The system is very much geared towards insurance only supporting the cheapest treatment in the short-term, which is normally pills, and in having an atomized care model where you get 15 minutes with your doctor and they follow a checklist to prescribe you something and then your relationship with them is over and you have to start from scratch if you want another appointment.
I really think the opioid epidemic in large part stems from opioids maximizing metrics that the modern healthcare and insurance industries judge themselves by - it 'solves' a ton of problems at a fairly low cost with very little physician time spent and no expensive in-care facilities needed. I think we could improve this and a lot of other medical problems if we weren't so focused on those metrics, but that would require really fundamentally changing the way the whole industry works.
Not to mention a tremendous amount of personal discipline, faith, and ability to work through pain for years and years. Trust me, as someone who has done PT and put in over ten thousand hours into stretching/exercise to deal with chronic pain, it is brutally difficult. Easily the most challenging thing I've struggled with in my life.
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3.2% is correct. His .32% was either a typo or a calculation error.
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I think this experiment has already been tried. Opioid prescriptions are the lowest they've been in decades, down 50% from 2010. Curiously, the downward trend in prescriptions coincides with the upward trend in opiate ODs
https://thegarrisonproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/opioid-prescribing-1400x788.png
https://drugabusestatistics.org/wp-content/uploads/131/opioid-prescriptions-and-opioid-overdose-deaths.png
Wouldn't be surprised if the short-term and long-term trends are different here - cracking down on prescriptions while tons of people are addicted will force them to look for non-prescription opioids which are more dangerous, but in the long run it may reduce the number of people who get addicted in the first place.
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