boo casino The Simple Stories About the Opioid Epidemic Are Wrong
Updated:2024-10-09 09:57 Views:98Finally, mercifully, the country’s astronomical drug overdose rate appears to be flattening out — even declining. This spring, national data began to show that overdose death rates were, after more than three decades of very steady increases, no longer growing. In factboo casino, they were beginning to drop. By now that fall is clear and striking — suggesting perhaps 10 percent fewer Americans dying from overdoses this year than last, according to a report published last week by NPR. Some leading researchers believe the data is trailing the story, and the decline is even bigger than the backward-looking indicators suggest — perhaps 15 percent year over year.
A 15 percent drop would represent miraculous progress and a windfall of mercy, given just how many Americans have been dying in recent years. But both the spectacular rise and the more modest recent fall of overdose deaths have somewhat complex, even counterintuitive drivers. And the recent good news still leaves the country at levels of overdose that would have once seemed like signs of civilizational collapse — either when compared with America’s deeper past, when drug mortality was a persistent but relatively small-scale problem, or with any of our peer countries, whose opioid epidemics produce barely one-tenth as many deaths as ours. Over the past decade, Americans have elevated a whole series of social problems into morality tales about the health of the country — homelessness and housing costs, crime and safety, to name a few. But the curves tracing the overdose epidemic tower above them all. In the space of just half a lifetime, the United States entered an entirely new world of drug death.
In 1982, the year I was born, the country officially recorded 6,299 overdose deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2022, the year I turned 40, the number was 107,941.
My childhood did not take place in some halcyon period of innocence and sobriety; it was pretty well wallpapered with alarmist warnings about drug use and addiction, and in the playground at my elementary school we’d often play games with the empty crack vials we found. The heroin epidemic of the 1970s had subsided, but although crack led to a new period of national panic, that panic rarely concerned deaths from overdose. In those days, even Americans anxious about drugs focused on other aspects of the crisis — lives shattered or rerouted, crime and violence and social disarray, the apparent menace of Black youth riding intense and short-lived highs — in part because deaths from overdose were remarkably rare. Not anymore. Since that time — since DARE and since “This is your brain on drugs,” since Nancy Reagan and very special episodes and national crack-baby panic — the number of American deaths each year from overdose hasn’t just grown; it has grown more than 15 times over.
By and large, Americans have understood this as an explosion in opioid use, one that reflected and expressed a kind of national despair, particularly visible among the country’s left-behind places. In this story, the overdose crisis both foretold the rise of Donald Trump and reminded liberals of the need to repair the country’s threadbare social fabric in the aftermath of the China shock and the great financial crisis.
But though overdoses are easier to measure than habitual use, the two are imperfect proxies for each other and tell quite different stories about the recent past. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, at least, American opioid use has been declining, steadily and significantly, since about 2015.
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