The article’s web-summary says 235 homeless people died in the UK in the last six months. The very first line of the full article says that it’s 235 in the last MONTH… which is a big difference. The next line goes on to specify that it’s about one death per 19 hours, which is consistent with the six-month figure, not the one-month figure. So let’s take the 235-per-six-month number as the one intended; 470 per year.
The problem is that the number presented is pretty worthless without context. 470 people per year sounds like a lot, but it is, really?
The worldwide death rate is 9 people per 1000 per year. The UK is right there on that average, as is the US.
The article doesn’t give any indication as to the total number of homeless people in the UK. I Googled it and Wikipedia says about 300,000, with about 24,300 of those sleeping outside of formal shelters. Wikipedia also notes that deaths among the homeless have more than doubled in the last five years. [As an aside, Wikipedia cites a Guardian article for that number, and that article uses a picture of the exact same window & red box (post box?) as the Metro article (published a year apart), except with a different sleeping bag.]
Anyway. If the 300K number is accurate, then you would expect 2700 deaths in that group per year… far, far above the 430 cited, implying that homelessness is stupendously healthy. If the Metro article was just talking about deaths among people “sleeping rough” (24.3K), then you would expect 219 of those folks to die each year.
SO. With context, the Metro article seems to be saying that people “sleeping rough” are dying at a rate more than twice the national average, and they feel the recorded number is low.
One other wrinkle is that the age distribution. Assuming deaths are concentrated in the 70+ age bracket, those sleeping rough may still have a much higher death rate, depending on how many of them are seniors. I would hope that the rate of sleeping rough is lower among people in their 70s than people in their 40s.
Yeah, given a short supply (e.g., 3 days worth) and testing to see if you’re actually taking it yourself, that adds up to making sure you don’t stockpile and then deal.
They are also testing to make sure you aren’t taking other drugs they don’t know about. For example, even though pot is legal here in Oregon, the “pain contract” I had to sign for my tramadol script says I can’t use it. They also look for other forms of opiates in case you are seeking drugs from multiple providers, or sharing with other people.
The existence of poverty does not make you a third world country.
Prior to 2015, we had an extreme poverty rate of approximately 0% in the US, which was defined to be people who were living on less than $1.25 per day (normalized for prices in each country). In 2015, they increased the amount to $1.90, and the extreme poverty rate in the US rose to around 1% as a result of that change.
But the reality is, this mere existence of extreme poverty is not the same as what exists in a third world country. Take a country like the Congo, where the percentage of their population living below this threshold is near 80%. Hell, even in a country like India, the percentage of their population living in extreme poverty is over 20%. (In the UK, it’s essentially 0)
Again, lest someone inevitably misunderstand this, pointing out these facts is not meant to suggest that the existence of such poverty in the US is acceptable. It’s merely meant to point out that suggesting that the existence of such poverty levels equates to being a third world country is hyperbolic nonsense.
One of the nastiest outcomes of the opiate situation (along with other drug revelations) for me is that I no longer trust doctors/drug companies. I have severe suspicions, for example, that the SSRIs they are pumping into everyone are long term (like after 20-30 years or more) unsafe. That they will end up, for example, somehow being linked to increased likelihood of dementia. Look at the massive increase in Levothyroxine that is being prescribed. Did 50% of the human race suddenly develop hypothyrodism that requires ongoing drug treatment in just the last 20 years? How the fuck did we lead relative healthy lives before all of this? It feels like now, everyone is put on some type of drug.
The problem with all of this is that it makes me dubious of all of the drugs that doctors routinely prescribe that are “beneficial.” I think doctors have god complexes, and as for drugs, I think they buy the bullshit the pharma companies sell, that these drugs are major beneficiaries to us, with relatively minor drawbacks.
Meanwhile, I have personally seen three family friends who have been on anti-depressants and similar drugs for long periods of time essentially just decay and die in their 60s and early 70s, including major mental decline (cognitive function, not just “they’re depressed”). Anecdotal? Sure. But none of this makes me feel good about taking my next prescription from a doctor because “some random number is supposed to be at 200 or less and it isn’t, take this drug, don’t worry, it’s safe.”
People mock anti-vaxxers (and I’m not one of them), but it’s shit like this that makes people cynical about everything in the medical profession.
I think there is a problem with the decline of holistic medicine, the rise of specialists, and the rise of prescription based medical therapy. By holistic i mean someone who coordinates and looks for a patient’s overall health rather than seeing patients as a set of discrete problems which they most of the time fob off to a specialist when it falls outside a very narrow and shallow category.
I’m not making a stand in defense of your premise - that SSRI’s are being over prescribed - but just that today in the US most “medicine” is effectively either a prescription or surgery, so maybe it’s not surprising. How many times has a doctor prescribed, for ex., a long vacation or a trip to another climate, or a milk diet, or something random like that? The only time things like lifestyle are virtually ever even considered seems to be cholesterol and weight.
The only proper penalty for the execs at Purdue is jail time.
Ballpark roughly 500K people have died of opioids this century. A $1 million per person as wrongful death settlement is sort of minimum, $2.2 million is the average settlement. So in round numbers that is $1 trillion right there.Most government agency put the value of a human life at nearer $10 million so that would mean they’d need $5 trillion just compensate the family of victims. It is many times revenue, much less profit for all the pharma companies (and not all Pharma sold opioids)
Now by all means fines are good, (and I say this as shareholder in both Pfizer and J&J.) But really jail time is the only appropriate punishment.
Have you guys ever seen what a pharma sales rep looks like? It’s like pitching drugs to doctors is a car show to these people. They send in young attractive females in short skirts to influence the doctors in their offices. It’s terrible.
The other rotten thing is the repeal of the laws that disallowed advertisement for drugs. Now we have commercials on every single stupid TV channel for various drugs, which explicitly state “Ask your doctor about taking our drug.” Shame on the government for allowing that. Shame on doctors for falling for it.
Again most of the big pharma companies spend more on marketing than they do R&D. Which is even worse than it sounds when you realize they can’t even market prescriptions in the EU or Canada.
While this is true, i think the statement is misleading to some degree.
Pharma companies are some of the biggest investors in R&D, period, across all industries, with the big companies spending around 20% of their revenue on R&D. The average spending on R&D by companies that create new products, across industry, is only 1.3%. Drugs do in fact take a mountain of money to develop.
One thing to keep in mind, when looking at the marketing budget of a company like J&J, is that they don’t just make prescription drugs. They make tons of consumer products, like shampoo and crap. A big part of that marketing budget that shows up in those “pharma spends more on marketing” stories, is the large marketing for these non pharmaceutical products.
I agree with you. Too many people equate holistic with “essential oils” or other similar bullshit. But realistically, it would be nice to have the days where doctors didn’t see you for 5 minutes, run some tests, and then prescribe shit based on test results with no real thought.
Also, my premise isn’t that SSRIs are being over prescribed. That was just one example, with which I have immediate knowledge, due to the aforementioned family members and friends.
Some examples of ways the fear of addiction to opiods (and other drugs - some that aren’t even addictive) can cause problems:
Case 1: Mary is an elderly woman who undergoes a surgery known to have a painful recovery process. The surgeon prescribes a dose of painkillers once every six hours. The painkillers last four hours. From hours 4-6, Mary is in terrible pain. During one of these periods, she says that she wishes she was dead. The surgeon leaps into action by…calling the on-call psychiatrist and saying “Hey, there’s a suicidal person on my ward, you should do psychiatry to her or something.” I am the on call psychiatrist. After a brief evaluation, I tell the surgeon that Mary has no psychiatric illness but needs painkillers every four hours. The surgeon lectures me on how There Is An Opioid Crisis, Y’Know, and we can’t negotiate with addicts and drug-seekers. I am a consultant on the case and can’t overule the surgeon on his own ward, so I just hang out with Mary for a while and talk about things and distract her and listen to her scream during the worst part of the six-hour cycle. After a few days the surgery has healed to the point where Mary is only in excruciating pain rather than actively suicidal, and so we send her home.
Case 4: John is a 70 year old man on opioids for 30 years due to a mining-related injury. He is doing very well. I am his outpatient psychiatrist but I only see him once every few months to renew meds. He gets some kind of infection, goes to the hospital, and due to normal hospital incompetence he doesn’t get his opioids. He demands his meds, and like many 70 year old ex-miners in terrible pain, he is not diligently polite the whole time. The hospital doctors are excited: they have caught an opioid addict! They tell his family and outpatient doctors he cannot have opioids from now on, then discharge him. He continues to be in terrible pain. At first he sneaks pills from an extra bottle of opioids he has at home, but eventually he uses all those up. After this, he is still in terrible pain with no reason to expect this to ever change, and so he quite reasonably shoots himself in the chest. This is the first point in this entire process at which anyone attempts to tell me any of this is going on, so I get a “HEY DID YOU KNOW YOUR PATIENT SHOT HIMSELF? DOESN’T SEEM LIKE YOU’RE DOING VERY GOOD PSYCHIATRIST-ING?” call. The patient miraculously survives, eventually finds a new pain doctor, and goes on to live a normal and happy life on the same dose of opioids he was using before.
On the other side of the ledger, you also get people whose lives are ruined by “let’s get you on opioids for this dental procedure then keep you on them for 8 months because reasons”.
There definitely needs to be some judgment here. The pushers of these drugs really screwed it up for everyone. And yeah, so many are terrified of using and accusatory too. Doesn’t sound like they are connecting or empowering with patients in these scenarios.
