This was the year the US finally woke up to what was happening in its midst. There were 70,200 overdose deaths, a sharp rise on the previous year and more than the toll from guns, car crashes or AIDS at the peak of its epidemic. At least 10 million people were misusing opioids, wasting an estimated $80 billion from the economy.
The awful scale of abuse and addiction raises issues over prohibition, exposing the futility of trying to curb the flow of illicit drugs in a globalised world where chemists in Asia can cook up new drugs for immediate sale across the 50 states of America. The Dayton coroner told me his team would monitor the dark web to determine the products that would soon be found inside bodies in their morgue.
But it sparks other issues too: over the US health system, which leaves so many poorer people without healthcare to tackle problems. Over the rapacious nature of unchecked capitalism, since the epidemic was fostered by a pharmaceutical firm pushing highly-addictive new painkillers and callous doctors signing dozens of daily prescriptions in ‘pill factories’. It has even provoked debate over rich philanthropists who profit from misery then launder their images with donations to major museums.[...]
The British Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton and his equally-brilliant wife Anne Case, economists at Princeton University who have tracked this plague of pointless fatalities among middle-aged white people, called them ‘deaths of despair’. They published a paper in 2017 called ‘Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century’. It revealed death rates of white people with no more than a high school diploma had grown to be 30% higher than those of black people — having been 30% lower at the turn of the century.
No comments:
Post a Comment