Eh not really…
He noted that cocaine deaths among black men have remained fairly constant for the 15 years the study measures, while opioid deaths among whites have skyrocketed, cautioning that interpretations of the data should look at the consequences of the crack-cocaine crisis of the 1980s.
Right, it’s been bad for a long time but no one has cared. That makes it worse, not “better”.
Or, to tell a different tale, back in 2004 black men were dying from cocaine overdose roughly equal to the rate whites are dying from opiods now. Remember all that talk about task forces and the “cocaine epidemic” back then? Right, neither do I. And they STILL ARE.
Yeah that.
Never fear, KellyAnne Motherfucking Conway is on the opiod crisis like flies on shit. And if anyone in this world cares more about black men dying from drugs, I have yet to meet them.
2 million pills a year for a town of 3100…
Drug companies hosed tiny towns in West Virginia with a deluge of addictive and deadly opioid pills over the last decade, according to an ongoing investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
For instance, drug companies collectively poured 20.8 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills into the small city of Williamson, West Virginia, between 2006 and 2016, according to a set of letters the committee released Tuesday. Williamson’s population was just 3,191 in 2010, according to US Census data…
…Combining data collected from the Drug Enforcement Administration and Miami-Luken, the House Energy and Commerce Committee dove into the situation in Williamson. Between 2006 and 2016, drug distributors collectively shipped 20.8 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to two pharmacies in the small city.
And a million a year for a town of 406:
The letter also reveals that in Kermit, West Virginia, a town of just 406 people, the company delivered 6.3 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills between 2005 and 2011. For just the year of 2008, the numbers work out to Miami-Luken providing 5,624 opioid painkiller pills for every man, woman, and child in the town, the committee notes.
Separate post, because the last bit is absolutely criminal:
The paper also noted that West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey was a former lobbyist for a trade group that represented Miami-Luken and other drug companies. In 2016, Morrisey ended several state lawsuits with drug companies, including one with Miami-Luken. The lawsuits, filed by the state’s former attorney general, Darrell McGraw, alleged that the companies flooded the state with opioid painkillers.
Agreed completely criminal. I see no reason that white collar drug dealer in pharmacautical companies shouldn’t be rotting in jail, along with the cartel top leaders
Help? Why bother? I’ve got private prisons to fill.
Jeff recommends Advil if you shatter a femur or the like. You pussy.
They’re basically mustache-twirling villains at this point.
The underlying effect of this affects my sister, who is does substance abuse and family counseling in West Virginia, a lot of it as contracted work for the state. It’s absolutely horrible. Besides opioid abuse being rampant, it has tricked down to affect nearly everything there. The family cases usually involve some sort of substance issues, the substance abusers themselves are many times recurring convicts, usually due to trying to chase money for more opioids.
She gives small tidbits of what it’s like, there is no way on earth I would want that job. But the worst part is that she is so pessimistic that it will ever be solved. It affects every part of the economy there.
Let them eat acetylsalicylic acid.
There actually have been studies suggesting that opiates are not actually better than standard painkillers like ibuprofen at controlling pain.
It all depends on the kind of pain. One has to be careful to not make broad inferences across the spectrum as it leads to idiotic statements like Sessions makes.
It also depends on how you define “pain control”. In my experience opiates don’t make the pain go away, they just help you endure it. Advil might actually reduce and inflammation that is causing the pain, which is great for a pain that can be treated that way. Useless for other causes of pain.
Yes very well put. The problem in the past, which the study @timex posted, was using opiates for things like hairline fractures, broken fingers, or sprained appendages. It was not smart to use opiates in many of these cases since the body works to dull the pain over time and Advil can make a physical difference by lessening inflammation. But giving someone Advil for acute appendicitis is ridiculous because it won’t do anything for them.
Sessions is such a dumb, cold, uncaring moron he doesn’t know the difference. Maybe if he gets horrendous cancer we can tell him to “just take some Advil and quit whining” when his organs are wracked with pain.
Sessions is indeed a moron. However, I’m just pointing out that there is a legitimate scientific reason to question the explosion of opiate prescriptions by doctors. They were viewed as the go to solution for serious pain control, and there is reason to question that assumption.
Drugs like marijuana can achieve a similar dissociative reduction in pain, with none of the addictive dangers… But of course, sessions hates marijuana too, because… Reasons?
There are a group of people in charge who simply do not care if a problem decimates the brown population, including their families, and suddenly showed up because white suburbia has the problem. We’ve never had great policies around drug problems, and for a minute I thought this time around they might be different, but only for these people… nope.
Honestly I think “overprescription” as it’s being discussed is a total red herring in the opiate crisis. That doesn’t result in enough scripts from one municipality to supply 90% of the city’s population. The real problem is fraudulent prescriptions flooding a black market for opiate abuse by addicts.
cite plz
See my article above