Thursday, July 15, 2021
PMT: The Other Pandemic
In 2020, a record 93,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, according to the Washington Post. That's about a 30% increase over the year before. It's almost one-third the number of people who died of COVID last year. The overwhelming majority of the overdoses involved opioids.
This is a spectacular failure.
It's a failure of public health. It's a failure of law enforcement. It's a failure of culture, and of values.
More than anything, it's a failure to pay attention to what matters most. While the traditional war on drugs was doing its thing-- and, as always, doing it with little real impact on actual drug use-- US drug companies were hooking Americans on opioids. OxyContin was advertised and pushed and marketed to doctors, and the Sackler family got filthy rich by pushing these drugs. None of them were ever convicted of anything, of course.
It's bizarre to me that so many Americans think they can ensure their safety by having a gun in their house-- a claim that is straight-up wrong-- but trot home from the hospital or a clinic or a street corner with a pocketful of lethal, highly addicted pills that have probably already killed someone they know.
The war on drugs not only didn't work, but it distracted us from the worst drug epidemic of our time, in terms of death. And now we are paying the price.
