Now, the Hurricane is Maria, and the victim is Puerto Rico. And the earthquake in Mexico may be even more destructive that then hurricane.
Not all storms are from the weather, though.
I was really taken aback by
a piece yesterday in the New York Times which laid out the current state of opioid addiction in the United States:
When
Penny Mae Cormani died in Utah, her family sang Mormon hymns — “Be
Still My Soul” — and lowered her small coffin into the earth. The latest
victim of a drug epidemic that is now taking 60,000 lives a year, Penny was just 1.
Increasingly,
parents and the police are encountering toddlers and young children
unconscious or dead after consuming an adult’s opioids.
At
the children’s hospital in Dayton, Ohio, accidental ingestions have
more than doubled, to some 200 intoxications a year, with tiny bodies
found laced by drugs like fentanyl. In Milwaukee, eight children have
died of opioid poisoning since late 2015, all from legal substances like
methadone and oxycodone. In Salt Lake City, one emergency doctor
recently revived four overdosing toddlers in a night, a phenomenon she
called both new and alarming.
“It’s
a cancer,” said Mauria Leydsman, Penny’s grandmother, of the nation’s
opioid problem, “with tendrils that are going everywhere.”
While
these deaths represent a small fraction of the epidemic’s toll, they
are an indication of how deeply the American addiction crisis has cut.
And
communities from Appalachia to the Rocky Mountains and beyond are
feeling its effects at all ages. In August, in the latest sign of the
direness of the situation, President Trump said he would declare the
opioid crisis a national emergency, a move that could allow cities and states to access federal disaster relief funds.
Eighty-seven
children died of opioid intoxication in 2015, according to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, up from just 16 in 1999. By
comparison, gunshot wounds kill four or five times as many children each
year.
But at hospitals like Primary Children’s in Utah, drug overdoses now outstrip gun injuries among young people.
“There
are no pill parties happening in preschools,” said Dr. Jennifer Plumb,
the emergency doctor who recently treated four opioid-sick toddlers in a
night. “These kids aren’t making a choice because they are trying to
get high on a substance. It’s that the pills are everywhere.”
Unlike infants born with addiction, these children are coming across heroin and other drugs in the days and years after birth.
In Philadelphia this summer, a 9-month-old rolled onto a needle while in bed
with her father. Kyleeh Isabella Mazaba, 20 months, died after drinking
methadone left in a water bottle in the family van. James Lionel
Vessell Jr., 2, swallowed oxycodone pills he found in a purse on his
mother’s bed. And in early August, Kentucky officials treated an infant
and three emergency responders believed to have been sickened by
carfentanil-laced heroin that traveled through the air.
If you didn't care about this much before, it's time to plug in.
To tackle this, there has to be a drastic reduction in the number of opioid pills sent into homes and the amount of illegal drugs on the street. The big Pharma companies will fight that hard, as will addicts, but it really must be done. I've
written about this before, and will again. But will our nation be willing to try new tactics?
# posted by Mark Osler @ 12:00 AM
