FiveThirtyEight: Data On Drug Use Is Disappearing Just When We Need It Most

Most major researchers believe that source, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, vastly understates the increase in heroin use. But many rely on the survey anyway for a simple reason: It’s the best data they have. Several other sources that researchers once relied on are no longer being updated or have become more difficult to access. The lack of data means researchers, policymakers and public health workers are facing the worst U.S. drug epidemic in a generation without essential information about the nature of the problem or its scale. [...]

Among the key questions that researchers are struggling to answer: Is the recent spike in deaths primarily the result of increased heroin use, or is it also due to the increased potency of the drug, perhaps because of the addition of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that can kill in small doses? [...]

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which is an annual household survey, is sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a division of the federal Department of Health and Human Services. Through roughly 70,000 interviews, the survey collects information nationwide on the use of tobacco, alcohol and illegal drugs, as well as Americans’ mental health. Experts who study illicit drugs say the survey is an important source for estimating the number of those who use alcohol, tobacco and, increasingly, cannabis (because of the normalization of marijuana use). But many consider it inadequate for calculating the number of users of harder drugs such as heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, which carry a greater stigma. Moreover, the survey excludes people without a fixed address, meaning people who are homeless or transient — a category that includes many of the heaviest drug users. These factors lead experts to believe the survey significantly underreports the number of users of hard drugs in the U.S. (A spokesman for SAMHSA said the survey doesn’t capture certain populations, including the homeless, and acknowledged that it faces other “limitations inherent in surveys.”) [...]

The lack of reliable national data is hindering efforts to tackle the spread of heroin, experts say. Some big cities such as New York have embarked on their own data-collection efforts, something the many smaller cities and towns ravaged by heroin overdoses likely can’t afford to do. Researchers say they need the federal government to help fund and coordinate efforts to collect data from local coroner’s offices, emergency rooms and crime labs so that local officials know where and how to direct their efforts. And, more broadly, they say they need a wide range of groups — researchers, public health workers, law enforcement officers, as well as federal, state and local governments — to work together to understand the heroin epidemic and to figure out how to stop it.

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FiveThirtyEight: Maybe Trump Didn’t Remake The Political Map

If we look at all the special elections, it’s interesting to note that Democrats this year have been outperforming their 2016 baseline most in the districts where Clinton underperformed Obama and least in the districts where Clinton outperformed Obama. The latter group tends to include more highly educated, suburban areas that traditionally voted Republican. These places may be growing bluer, but perhaps Clinton did as well as could be hoped for by a Democratic candidate for the time being. In the districts where Clinton didn’t do as well as Obama had, it’s possible that traditional Democratic voters who voted for Trump in 2016 may not be voting for Republicans in 2017. [...]

For starters, it suggests that Democrats should not give up on areas where Clinton did significantly worse than Obama did. Democrats gained a seat in a special state legislative election in New York where Clinton underperformed Obama by 9 points compared with the national vote, for example. Many of the areas where Clinton did worse than Obama and where there was a large swing in the 2017 special elections, like South Carolina 5, have a low percentage of college-educated voters. So perhaps Democrats should continue to try to compete in traditionally competitive districts with fewer college-educated voters — voters that have traditionally gone Democratic, but went for Trump. These voters may have cast a ballot for Trump, but they’ll apparently still pull the Democratic lever, at least when Trump isn’t on the ballot. [...]

More broadly, the results of this year’s special elections suggest — as have some commentators — that Democrats would benefit from a broad House playing field in 2018. When the electoral map is in flux, like it is now, what the partisan baseline is for an individual district — how Democratic is it, compared with the nation as a whole? — isn’t going to be entirely clear. And because Democrats need 24 seats to take back the House, they really can’t afford to leave any stone unturned.

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Katoikos: Analogies between the Ayotzinapa disappearances and the Grenfell Tower fire

In September 2014, the Mexican town of Ayotzinapa became world-famous overnight, when a group of 43 poor, radical and indigenous students from the local teaching college went missing after being attacked by police in Iguala, a town also located in the narco-dominated state of Guerrero. Facts about the students’ fate were scarce, but it was soon abundantly clear that the Government’s story that they had been kidnapped by drug gangs didn’t hang together and that ministers and military figures were protecting whoever was responsible. Demonstrations demanding truth and justice swept the country, and the number 43 quickly came to symbolise all that was corrupt about how the country was run. [...]

All were keen to stress the basic factual distinctions between the two situations. One major difference highlighted by Rod, an economist who has lived in Mexico City for over 30 years, is that in the case of Grenfell there has been no fairy story, no apparent cover-up by the authorities. Although it’s certainly the case that the Daily Mail and Express both tried to scapegoat first an Ethiopian immigrant and then EU environmental regulations for the fire, those explanations were not at the heart of the State’s explanation. Rod points out that while Theresa May took some responsibility for the deaths and, after some prevarication, did visit the site, Enrique Peña-Nieto, the current president of Mexico, avoided doing so altogether. [...]

For Pablo, both events were characterised by a lack of official interest in protecting the most vulnerable, and the public outrage in both cases partly resulted from decades of inequality. Lisa echoes this, highlighting the fact that both disasters happened to people who have no power and who routinely suffer discrimination. She draws a further analogy with the 1989 human crush at Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield, in the wake of which the families of the victims were routinely smeared and depicted in the tabloid press as subhuman, in part on the basis of a police disinformation campaign.

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Haaretz: It's Only About Them: U.S. Jews' Outrage on the Wall, Silence on the Occupation Is Obscene

Six months later, this controversy has escalated, leading those Reform and Conservative leaders to cancel a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu in protest of his abandonment of a deal that promised space for egalitarian worship at the Wall.

Commentators have already made compelling points about the absurdity of U.S. Jews’ surprise at the turn of events. Noam Sheizaf pointed out (U.S. Jews can’t expect Israel to be liberal only where they want it to) the community’s prime mistake: to assume that their interests can be separated from Israeli politics "and therefore shielded from the nativist and xenophobic ideological trends" now dominating Israel. Chemi Shalev wrote (Netanyahu to American Jews: Drop Dead) that U.S. Jews "know all too well that Netanyahu is the greatest enemy of their cherished ideals of pluralism and equality and liberal values...[which they betray] when they support a government they would find abhorrent under any other circumstances." [...]

It is obscene that on the fiftieth anniversary of the occupation, as a quarter of a million West Bank Palestinians were denied entry to Jerusalem to pray and to celebrate during Ramadan, and as Palestinians in Gaza observed their fast and celebrations in the dark, with barely enough clean drinking water or electricity to survive, American Jewish leaders are upset that they can't just drop in for a visit and close a backroom deal with the prime minister. [...]

I cannot count the number of times over the years that I have been told by Jewish establishment leaders that if anti-occupation activists would just use more polite tones and tactics we could finally change things. Now those same American Jewish leaders have found out for themselves how far "behaving nicely"’ gets them with Israel’s government. We already knew that only if we disrupt business as usual can we create real, sustained, public pressure to end the crisis of ongoing American Jewish support for the occupation.

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Slate: Who’s Afraid of Aymann Ismail?

I didn’t plan to do anything at the Republican National Convention last summer beyond shooting some photos. I was there as a photojournalist. But just after landing in Cleveland, as I waited in line to get in, a man in full Thomas Jefferson costume approached me and asked: “Are you Muslim?” I told him yes. He told me Islam was evil.

I’m used to this: People openly stared when I photographed the new World Trade Center being built on assignment in Manhattan. But in Cleveland, when I talked to people—really talked to them—I could tell meeting a real Muslim face to face made some kind of impact.

I’ve come to believe that many Americans are motivated by fear. Fear that I’ll force women to cover themselves. Fear that they’ll be subject to Sharia law. Fear that I’d kill if given the chance. So I’m going to confront those fears, one by one. In “Who’s Afraid of Aymann Ismail?,” a new Slate video series, I’m going to travel and meet with anti-Muslim activists, hostile state legislatures, and my own family to find out if there really is anything to fear about American Muslims.