Everyone who supports prohibition has blood on their hands. No, your ignorance and stupidity is not an excuse. Pathetic people.
Bleak New Estimates in Drug Epidemic: A Record 72,000 Overdose Deaths in 2017
181–190 of 217 posts
Re: Bleak New Estimates in Drug Epidemic: A Record 72,000 Overdose Deaths in 2017
#182The amount of responsibility laundering that's happening is staggering. Is it the fault of the doctors for prescribing strong painkillers or the responsibility of lobbyists for keeping the status quo as it is. Or is it the responsibility of patients to not seek strong opiates for the smallest aches? On whom falls the blame for this?
It is mainly responsibility of voters who keep corrupt and evil people in charge. If you voted for a prohibition supporter you have blood on your hands.
Re: Bleak New Estimates in Drug Epidemic: A Record 72,000 Overdose Deaths in 2017
#183The amount of responsibility laundering that's happening is staggering. Is it the fault of the doctors for prescribing strong painkillers or the responsibility of lobbyists for keeping the status quo as it is. Or is it the responsibility of patients to not seek strong opiates for the smallest aches? On whom falls the blame for this?
Like most things, probably the combination of all of them.
It might be convenient to ask for that "one prime mover", but the reality is usually way too complex for that.
Re: Bleak New Estimates in Drug Epidemic: A Record 72,000 Overdose Deaths in 2017
#184> Analysts pointed to two major reasons for the increase: A growing number of Americans are using opioids, and drugs are becoming more deadly. It is the second factor that most likely explains the bulk of the increased number of overdoses last year. So, the increase in deaths is likely because of drugs becoming more deadly. How are drugs becoming more deadly ? It seems like this is how: > Strong synthetic opioids lik…
If people had easy access to clean drugs, deaths could be avoided. Opiates are fairly safe if dose is correct and are not contaminated. Then people could get psychological help to remove the need to take them.
Re: Bleak New Estimates in Drug Epidemic: A Record 72,000 Overdose Deaths in 2017
#185As a comparison, the road toll in the USA is 33,000 per year. Firearms kill about the same number (including 20,000 suicides). 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks. 72,000 overdose deaths is just a staggeringly large number.
> 72,000 overdose deaths is just a staggeringly large number. It's still only a drop in the bucket compared to overall drug-related deaths though. Tobacco-related deaths alone account for 500k deaths annually, and that's not even counting deaths related to third-hand smoke.
Very few of those tobacco-related deaths are of 20 and 30 year-olds.
I'm not sure if drugs take away more overall years of life then tobacco, but the numbers are probably not that far off.
Re: Bleak New Estimates in Drug Epidemic: A Record 72,000 Overdose Deaths in 2017
#186This is absolutely terrible. I worked in an inner-city setting servicing the addictions and psychiatry population as the fentanyl crisis started evolving several years ago. I would see the usual patient every day with no signs of instability, until they suddenly disappeared for a few days and were later found to have overdosed. Perfectly ordinary, pleasant people. We try to prevent these events by sending teams aroun…
Too many people profit from those deaths to have this happened.
Re: Bleak New Estimates in Drug Epidemic: A Record 72,000 Overdose Deaths in 2017
#187It seems like the term "overdoses" is obscuring the problem which is more "toxic (lethal) stuff is increasingly being mixed into illicit drugs of all kinds".
There's a simple solution: legalize all drugs. All of them. Let people get what they want. Then, if the government must do something, pump all that money they were spending on the drug war into treatment centers.
Re: Bleak New Estimates in Drug Epidemic: A Record 72,000 Overdose Deaths in 2017
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
My own preferred hypothesis is that this is the result of despair : https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/joblessne... Someone will no doubt reply that US unemployment is falling, and therefore so should the opiates crisis, but it's not a simple matter of economics and statistics, it's a question of what people believe about the world and their future in it. Someone who gets a bad, painful job with no ag…
Manufacturing jobs are booming in the US. The very people that you're implying are hopeless, that specific demographic, have access to blue collar jobs in a way they haven't in nearly a generation. The US hasn't seen this kind of sustained manufacturing job growth since the mid 1990s. The US has drug problems, and has for 50 years, that other first or second tier nations in worse structural condition never picked up.…
> This goes all the way back to peak US economics of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the US had a standard of living that it has taken the best European nations 50 years to catch up to.
So the "best European nations" will have reached a living standard, like the US of 60/70s, by the year 2020?
I mean, I'm not even convinced the US currently is anywhere near the standard it had back then, so that claim sounds a bit bold.
Could you quantify that in any way? The UN's Human Development Index could be of great help for that, sadly they only started doing that since 1990. So how are you measuring "standard of living"?
Re: Bleak New Estimates in Drug Epidemic: A Record 72,000 Overdose Deaths in 2017
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
The doctors. Anyone who spends the better part of a decade studying medicine can't be ignorant about opioids and addiction, regardless of what the slimy Purdue representative tells them. The only excuse they have for the blatant over prescribing of opioids (2 months worth of oxy for getting wisdom teeth pulled kind of thing) is that if they don't do it, the patient will just go to another doctor. But how can you just…
> 2 months worth of oxy for getting wisdom teeth pulled kind of thing Surely this is not the norm? My son had his wisdom teeth out a few years ago, they gave him about a day's worth of hydrocodone and told him to take Tylenol after that. And all the doctors my family has seen for the past couple of decades have been pretty conservative about prescribing anything narcotic for pain.
I had all 4 wisdom teeth pulled 8 years ago (USA). Was given 60 Lortab pills for pain. I only took 1 the day after the operation, the pain really was not bad at all. Insanity.
Re: Bleak New Estimates in Drug Epidemic: A Record 72,000 Overdose Deaths in 2017
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 2 months worth of oxy for getting wisdom teeth pulled kind of thing Surely this is not the norm? My son had his wisdom teeth out a few years ago, they gave him about a day's worth of hydrocodone and told him to take Tylenol after that. And all the doctors my family has seen for the past couple of decades have been pretty conservative about prescribing anything narcotic for pain.
Here in the EU, the doctor didn't give me any strong opiod. They just pulled the tooth and sent me home. When the pain reached a score of 8 / 10 on my personal score card, I took one Tylenol and another 1/2 before bed that day and didn't take anything else the next day.
Yup same here in Germany, you can ask for something against the pain, but that will usually only get you a prescription for Ibuprofen 600/800 mg.
Took those way to long over jaw issues until I got stomach problems, asked the dentist for something else and he prescribed metamizole drops.
Didn't use many of those as they sometimes give me kidney pains.