Friday, November 30, 2018

THE U.S. MORTALITY CRISIS: CDC REPORTS EXTRAORDINARY DROP IN LIFE EXPECTANCY

The US mortality crisis: CDC reports extraordinary drop in life expectancy

By Trévon Austin 
30 November 2018
Life expectancy in the United States continued its extraordinary decline in 2017 after stagnating in 2016 and falling in 2015. Not since the combined impact of World War I and the Spanish Flu in 1918 has the country experienced such a prolonged period of decline in life expectancy.
The annual mortality report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) highlights the disastrous impact of the social crisis on the American working class. Suicides and drug overdoses, what have been termed deaths of despair, have been identified as the driving forces behind the continuing decline in how long Americans are expected to live.
Age-adjusted drug overdose death rates: United States, 1999–2017
In 2017, over 2.8 million Americans died, an increase by approximately 70,000 from the previous year and the most deaths in a single year since the US government began keeping records. From 2016 to 2017, the age-adjusted death rate for the entire population increased by 0.4 percent.
The average life expectancy in the US declined from 78.7 to 78.6 years. Life expectancy dropped for males from 76.2 to 76.1 but remained the same for females at 81.1. Life expectancy for females has consistently been higher than males and the gap continues to widen. In 2017, the difference in life expectancy between females and males increased 0.1 year from 4.9 years in 2016 to 5.0 years in 2017.
Age-specific death rates between 2016 and 2017 increased for age groups 25–34, 35–44, and 85 and over. These statistics indicate a healthcare system failing the elderly and a societal crisis ravaging younger workers. Deaths of despair, including alcoholism, are a leading cause of deaths in younger ages groups.

The US suicide death rate rose to the highest in 50 years last year. Since 2008, it has ranked as the 10th leading cause of death for all ages in the US. In 2016, suicide became the second leading cause of death for ages 10–34 and the fourth leading cause for ages 35–54. From 1999 to 2017, suicide rates have increased for both males and females, with the greatest yearly increases occurring since 2006.
The average annual increase in suicide rates shifted from about one percent per year from 1999 through 2006 to two percent per year from 2006 through 2017. The age-adjusted rate of suicide among females increased from 4.0 per 100,000 in 1999 to 6.1 in 2017, while the rate for males increased from 17.8 to 22.4.
Age-adjusted suicide rates, by sex: United States, 1999–2017
The study also focuses on suicide in depressed rural regions. In 1999, the suicide rate in rural counties was 1.4 times the rate of most urban areas. The rate in rural areas was 13.1 per 100,000 with urban areas having a rate of 9.6 per 100,000. The difference further increased in 2017 with the suicide rate for the most rural counties (20.0 per 100,000) increasing to 1.8 times the rate for the most urban counties (11.1).
The rate in drug overdoses has skyrocketed in the same period. From 1999 to 2017, the overdose rate soared from 6.1 per 100,000 to 21.7 per 100,000. The rate increased by an average of 10 percent per year from 1999 to 2006, by 3 percent per year from 2006 to 2014, and a staggering 16 percent per year from 2014 to 2017. The rise coincides with the opioid crisis ravaging through parts of the US, concentrated in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The figures contained in the latest CDC report are a reflection of the diseased nature of American society and the failure of the capitalist system. The last decade has seen a historic rise in social inequality in the aftermath of the economic crash of 2008 and the bailout of Wall Street, overseen by Obama and the Democrats, which saw the greatest transfer of wealth in history from the working class to the rich.
Low-wage, tenuous employment, where it is available, has replaced the jobs that were destroyed in the process. The boondoggle that is known as Obamacare, far from providing the population with healthcare, has funneled billions of dollars to the healthcare industry and increased corporate profits by compelling workers to buy substandard health insurance out of their own pocket.
Life expectancy at selected ages, by sex: United States, 2016 and 2017
CDC director Robert R. Redfield lamented over the implications of his organization’s report: “The latest CDC data show that the US life expectancy has declined over the past few years. Tragically, this troubling trend is largely driven by deaths from drug overdose and suicide,” he said in a press release.
“Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the Nation’s overall health and these sobering statistics are a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable.”
As indicated by the prevalence of suicide in rural regions, joblessness and social isolation reap a terrible toll. Workers are driven to despair under the ruling class assault against the living standards won by the working class in the 20th century.
There is no solution to the continued decline in life expectancy forthcoming from the ruling class. In reality, the increased death rates are seen as the cost of doing business, necessary to funnel ever greater sums of money into the pockets of robber barons like Jeff Bezos and fuel unprecedented spending on the US military.
A socialist response is required to meet the needs of the working class. A direct assault must be launched on the wealth of the corporate and financial elite. The wealth of the one percent must be expropriated to fund universal healthcare and turn the giant pharmaceutical companies into publicly-owned utilities.
The decades-long campaign to strip workers of their social gains must be reversed. Society must be transformed to ensure that every person has access to high quality healthcare, education and housing, and ensure the right to a high-paying job and leisure. Above all, this requires the building of a mass working class movement independent of both big business parties, fighting for socialism.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with foreign labor. That process spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate priceswidens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.


Opioid Nation


by Barry Meier
Random House, 223 pp., $27.00

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America

by Beth Macy
Little, Brown, 376 pp., $28.00

American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts

by Chris McGreal
PublicAffairs, 316 pp., $27.00
Jerome Sessini/Magnum Photos
A man who has just taken heroin, Philadelphia, April 2018
The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that 72,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2017, up from some 64,000 the previous year and 52,000 the year before that—a staggering increase with no end in sight. Most involved opioids.
A few definitions are in order. The term opioid is now used to include opiates, which are derivatives of the opium poppy, and opioids, which originally referred only to synthesized drugs that act in the same way as opiates do. Opium, the sap from the poppy, has been used throughout the world for thousands of years to treat pain and shortness of breath, suppress cough and diarrhea, and, maybe most often, simply for its tranquilizing effect. The active constituent of opium, morphine, was not identified until 1806. Soon a variety of morphine tinctures became readily available without any social opprobrium, used, in some accounts, to combat the travails and boredom of Victorian women. (Thomas Jefferson was also an enthusiast of laudanum, one of the morphine tinctures.) Heroin, a stronger opiate made from morphine, entered the market later in the nineteenth century. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that synthetic or partially synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, methadone, oxycodone (Percocet), hydrocodone (Vicodin), and hydromorphone (Dilaudid), were developed.
In 1996 a new form of oxycodone called OxyContin came on the market, and three recent books—Beth Macy’s Dopesick, Chris McGreal’s American Overdose, and Barry Meier’s Pain Killer—blame the opioid epidemic almost entirely on its maker, Purdue Pharma. OxyContin is formulated to be released more slowly and therefore lasts longer. The company claimed that the drug’s slow release would make it less addictive than ordinary oxycodone, since the initial euphoria—the high—would be muted. Based on this theory and little else, the FDA permitted OxyContin to contain twice the usual dose of oxycodone and carry on the label this statement: “Delayed absorption, as provided by OxyContin tablets, is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.” (The FDAofficial who oversaw OxyContin’s approval later got a plum job at Purdue Pharma.)
The company launched an extraordinarily aggressive and successful marketing campaign to convince physicians that they had the holy grail of a nonaddictive opioid. It sent hundreds of sales representatives to doctors’ offices to tout OxyContin, and offered doctors dinners and trips to meetings at luxury resorts. And it paid more than five thousand doctors, pharmacists, and nurses to train as speakers to tour the country promoting OxyContin. But like all opioids, OxyContin is addictive. And soon enough, users found that they could crush the pills or dissolve the coating, then snort the drug like cocaine or inject it like heroin. Each pill would then become essentially an instantaneous double dose of oxycodone.
OxyContin almost immediately became a blockbuster—that is, a prescription drug with annual sales of more than $1 billion. It was widely used not just by those for whom the prescriptions were written, but by their relatives and friends. The pills were also sold or stolen or otherwise diverted to street use. In addition, “pill mills” sprang up, where unethical physicians wrote innumerable prescriptions for OxyContin and refilled them automatically without ever seeing the patient. McGreal describes “one of the most productive pill mills in the country,” which operated in the small town of Williamson, West Virginia—known locally as “Pilliamson.” The town, he says, “was awash in pills,” and people came by car and bus to line up at the clinic and cooperating drugstores. “Investigators calculated that in 2009 alone, the clinic pulled in $4.6 million in a town with a population of little more than three thousand people.”
It’s impossible to know how many new prescriptions were obtained in each of these ways, but one way or another, OxyContin addiction grew into an epidemic. The epicenter was central Appalachia, and its victims were mainly white people in small, economically depressed coal-mining communities in southern West Virginia and parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and southwestern Virginia.1
The three books that focus on Purdue Pharma are in a sense the same book. Barry Meier first published Pain Killer in 2003. The new edition (released by a different publisher) is much the same, with some updating and re-arrangements. The two new books, Dopesick and American Overdose, cover the same story as it unfolded in the same region of the country. Both Macy and McGreal refer to the 2003 edition of Meier’s book (but not the new edition, probably because they could not have known of it at the time their books were written). All three books are gripping and well written, with detailed accounts, one after another (perhaps too many), of families decimated by the epidemic. And they all tell the story of Art Van Zee, a physician in southwestern Virginia, who in 2000 became aware of the growing epidemic of OxyContin there and tried heroically to get Purdue Pharma and the FDA to take responsibility for it.
Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family that founded it are very hard to defend. By aggressively marketing OxyContin, even after they knew it was being widely abused, the family became enormously wealthy. But the FDA was also guilty. It permitted OxyContin to be sold as a relatively nonaddictive opioid without good evidence to support that claim, and it should have been obvious that the pills might be crushed or dissolved to make them even more addictive. Van Zee, along with Beth Davies, a nun who ran the local substance abuse clinic, saw Lee County, Virginia, blanketed with OxyContin prescriptions and watched the deaths mount, particularly among young people. They informed Purdue, which simply stonewalled. Over the following year, Van Zee devoted himself completely to the cause, meeting with company and FDAofficials and testifying before a Senate committee, trying to get Purdue to reformulate the drug or even withdraw it from the market.
In 2007 Purdue pled guilty to criminal charges of fraudulently marketing OxyContin and settled for $600 million in fines and penalties. Three executives pled guilty to misdemeanor charges and were sentenced to four hundred hours of community service and lesser fines. The company’s fine was trivial in comparison with its profits from OxyContin. In fact, almost every other major pharmaceutical company has had to settle both civil and criminal charges of fraudulent marketing for much more (the record settlement is now GlaxoSmithKline’s $3 billion, for a variety of violations, including falsely promoting drugs and failing to report safety data). These kinds of fines are just the cost of doing business. And so it was for Purdue Pharma, although the fraudulent marketing stopped and a warning was added to the label.
The problem with these three books, and it’s a big one, is that they treat the Purdue story as though it were the whole story of the opioid epidemic. But OxyContin did not give rise to opioid addiction, although it jump-started the current epidemic. Heroin has been a common street drug ever since it was banned in 1924. Morphine has also been widely abused.
Nor would taking OxyContin off the market end the epidemic. The overwhelming majority of opioid deaths are caused not by OxyContin but by combinations of fentanyl, heroin, and cocaine, often brought in from China via Mexican cartels, and frequently taken along with benzodiazepines (such as Valium or Xanax) and alcohol. These drugs are cheaper and stronger, particularly fentanyl. Fentanyl was first synthesized in 1960, and soon became widely used as an anesthetic and powerful painkiller. It is legally manufactured and highly effective when used appropriately, often for short medical procedures such as colonoscopies. The illicit production and street use is relatively new, but it is now the main cause of most opioid-related deaths (nearly 90 percent in Massachusetts).
The steady increase in opioid deaths after OxyContin came on the market has been supplanted by a much faster increase starting around 2013, when heroin and fentanyl use increased dramatically. We now have two epidemics—the overuse of prescription drugs and the much more deadly and now largely unrelated epidemic of street drugs. By concentrating on the first, we are closing the barn door after the horse is long gone.
Efforts to deal with the epidemic have been all over the map—literally. Possession of illegal drugs (and legal drugs illicitly used) is still a federal crime, and prisons are still full of people whose only crime was that. But many states, counties, and cities have begun to regard opioid addiction as a public health issue, not a police issue. They are opening centers in which people who seek help are shifted to less powerful opioids like methadone and buprenorphine (Subutex)—a method known as “medication-assisted treatment,” or MAT. Naloxone (Narcan), the antidote for an opioid overdose, is now sold over the counter in almost all states. If used immediately, it can prevent an otherwise inevitable death from a drug overdose. And drug courts, which may drop criminal charges in return for an agreement to submit to treatment and monitoring, are becoming more common.
Nan Goldin/Marian Goodman Gallery
Nan Goldin: Withdrawal/Quicksand, Berlin/NY, February 2016, 2016
Most controversial are facilities called “safe injection sites,” or SIFs, where drug users can come to use drugs without fear of arrest. The staff provides clean needles to reduce the risk of HIV and hepatitis C infections, and is prepared to resuscitate addicts who overdose. This approach is called “harm reduction.” The problem is that addicts must still buy drugs illegally, and it’s almost impossible to know exactly what is in them.
In a recent New York Times Op-Ed, the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, came down hard on SIFs. He warned that “it is a federal felony to maintain any location for the purpose of facilitating illicit drug use,” and that “cities and counties should expect the Department of Justice to meet the opening of any injection site with swift and aggressive action.” He was referring to plans to operate SIFs in San Francisco, New York City, and Seattle, and similar options now being considered by Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Later in the same article, however, he softened, saying we should “help drug users get treatment and aggressively prosecute criminals who supply the deadly poison,” suggesting that perhaps he doesn’t believe simple possession is so bad, after all.
But the proposed solutions to this epidemic range from the extreme of “lock ’em up” to “drug abuse is no less a disease than cancer or diabetes” and should therefore be met with the same solicitude. Ryan Hampton exemplifies the latter view in his angry book, American Fix. A former drug user himself and now an impassioned advocate and activist, he insists that drug abuse should be regarded like other diseases. He doesn’t acknowledge that for most users there was a moment of choice in becoming addicted that is not the case for people with cancer or diabetes. After receiving Dilaudid for a painful ankle, Hampton decided to ask for more, and then more. I think one can make the argument for sympathy with drug users and for understanding how the quest for drugs ceases to be under their control without claiming an analogy to diseases like cancer or diabetes.
Hampton paints a vivid picture of the downward spiral of addiction. When he “leveled up to IV heroin,” he explains, “it was cheaper than pills, easier to get hold of, and a quarter the cost. More important, nobody was tracking us in a database.”
Where Hampton is at his best is in his exposure of the profiteering and corruption in the burgeoning addiction industry—what he calls “the treatment industry swamp.” In the swamp, he found
lack of effective treatment, exorbitant costs, and ridiculous twenty-eight-day vacations disguised as medical help, fed by patient brokers who run a completely legal, high-end human trafficking cartel to push tens of thousands of patients through the broken system.
He was referring to the panoply of treatment centers, both residential and outpatient, and detox facilities, where users are supposed to be weaned from drugs before entering “sober living houses.” As in so much of American medicine, even nonprofit insurers like Medicaid outsource the actual delivery of care to for-profit companies that charge whatever the market will bear. According to Hampton, “one of the most expensive treatment centers in America, Passages Malibu, costs more than $60,000 per month.” Costs are settled by a crazy quilt of payers, including state and local governments, Medicaid, other federal programs, private insurers, and often by desperate families. Not surprisingly, only a minority of users are ever treated.
In 2017 the Aspen Institute’s Health Strategy Group, led by two former secretaries of health and human services, Tommy Thompson and Kathleen Sebelius, and consisting of twenty-four members from various health-related fields (I am among them), met for three days to examine the opioid epidemic. The deliberations were preceded by four presentations by experts in the field. In the final broad and comprehensive report, the group made a strong case for decriminalizing drug addiction and instead regarding it as a public health issue. Among the five major recommendations was a call for more research into nearly all aspects of the epidemic. It’s startling how little we know, given the immensity of the problem and the media attention it receives.2
We need to know, for instance, how effective opioids are for different kinds of pain, including long-term treatment for chronic pain. We need to know how opioids compare in effectiveness and side effects with acetaminophen (which can cause liver failure) and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen (which can cause gastrointestinal bleeding). We need to know how the death rate in the opioid epidemic compares with the rate of use. We know the death rate is soaring, but does that mean the rate of use is, too, or is it simply a result of the lethality of the drug mixtures obtained on the street? We need to know how much diversion there is now from legitimate treatment to abuse. That includes diversion of methadone and buprenorphine, which are also opioids and can be sold on the street or added to the user’s illicit intake. According to Macy, “Buprenorphine is the third-most-diverted opioid in the country, after oxycodone and hydrocodone.”
We need to know how many addicts want to quit, since most don’t seek treatment. Why don’t they? And finally, we need to know the best approach to treatment. There is concern, for example, that detox might be dangerous, because the first dose after a relapse can be deadly if the user is no longer tolerant to the drug’s effects. Is providing methadone or buprenorphine indefinitely, even for life, the best treatment among bad choices? There is plenty of speculation about all of these questions, and suggestive findings about some of them, but little solid evidence.
We also need to remember an essential and crucial fact: opioids do have a legitimate purpose, and it’s an enormously important one. They treat severe pain, often when no other treatment is effective. Patients suffering from cancer are sometimes completely dependent on opioids for relief, as are some patients with other forms of severe pain. As the authors of the books acknowledge, pain was systematically undertreated throughout most of the twentieth century. After centuries of free and easy use of opioids, there was a sudden reaction in the United States at the start of the twentieth century, which had much to do with anti-immigrant sentiment, particularly animus toward Chinese immigrants who were widely assumed to be opium addicts. (It also paralleled the growing reaction against alcohol that resulted in Prohibition.) The 1914 Harrison Narcotics Tax Act imposed strict regulations on the use of opioids; they had to be prescribed by physicians, and then only for patients not already taking them. Prohibition lasted for only thirteen years, but the dread of opioid addiction stayed with us until the 1980s and caused cruel suffering for generations of patients.
Even in hospitals where cancer patients lay dying in agony, opioids were administered reluctantly, in small doses, and at infrequent intervals. When I was in training in a teaching hospital in the 1960s, there was an awful ritual to it. The drugs were administered according to a pro re nata (prn) regimen (ostensibly “as needed”) that required the patient to wait out a four-hour interval, no matter how severe the pain, and then request the next dose. Those who badly wanted the drug had to keep track of the time and have the strength and endurance to summon a nurse if one was nearby. Patients were sometimes inhibited in asking for the next dose by a desire to please the medical staff and not be a nuisance, or by their own belief that taking morphine was somehow wrong or reflected weakness. The extent to which nurses and physicians shared the common fears of addiction influenced their readiness to respond. Desperate patients would count the minutes toward the end of the interval, hoping they could flag down a nurse. Many doctors and nurses interpreted the anxiety and clock-watching as a sign of growing addiction, not inadequate pain relief. These patients were labeled “drug-seeking” and often punished for it by being denied the very help they needed.
During the 1980s there was a welcome change in that attitude, partly due to the hospice movement that had begun in the United Kingdom. The prn system became more flexible, or was eliminated altogether. There was a realization that because pain is entirely subjective, there is no way to measure or verify it, and even patients with the same condition could differ in their experience of pain. Instead of having to flag down nurses, patients were asked at shorter intervals whether they needed pain relief, and how much. In 2001 the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations proclaimed pain the fifth vital sign, to be assessed in every patient, along with heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature, and blood pressure. Although the motivation for this move was laudable, it presented problems, since, unlike the other four vital signs, pain can’t be objectively quantified.
The authors of the books under review recognize the history of inadequate treatment of pain throughout most of the twentieth century, but they don’t give it its due. They concentrate instead on the reaction of the 1980s, which they consider excessive and an underlying cause of the opioid epidemic. In 1982 I wrote an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine, which began, “Few things a doctor does are more important than relieving pain.” I still believe that. I ended with these words: “Pain is soul-destroying. No patients should have to endure intense pain unnecessarily. The quality of mercy is essential to the practice of medicine; here, of all places, it should not be strained.”
The opioid epidemic, while horrifying, is still outweighed by alcohol deaths, which are also increasing, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Hampton writes, “If my first drug of choice came with a prescription, the second one, alcohol, was culturally embedded and used to celebrate at every turn of events.” In 2016, when there were 64,000 deaths in the US from the drug epidemic, there were 90,000 from alcohol (including accidents and homicides caused by inebriated people, as well as direct effects, mainly cirrhosis of the liver). Cigarette smoking is estimated to cause 480,000 deaths a year. I do not intend to minimize the opioid epidemic. Far from it. What I want to underscore is the differences in these three epidemics. Alcohol and cigarettes have no medical or practical uses of any kind. Yet we permit their use if regulated. In contrast, opioids do have medical uses, and they are important.
The opioid epidemic is usually seen as a supply problem. If we can interdict the supply of prescription opioids, the thinking goes, we can stanch the epidemic. But that is unlikely to work for two reasons. First, as I pointed out, this is no longer mainly an epidemic of prescription drugs but of street drugs. And second, it creates an onerous obstacle for doctors and outpatients who require pain treatment. More and more, they have to satisfy regulations expressly designed to restrict access to prescription opioids. Some make sense. For example, it’s reasonable to monitor opioid prescriptions to detect pill mills. It’s also reasonable to flag users who “doctor-shop,” that is, see several doctors at once to try to get multiple doses of opioids.
But other requirements are meant simply to inconvenience both doctors and patients until they give up. For example, in Massachusetts doctors must limit their first-time opioid prescriptions to seven days. That can be more than an inconvenience for ill patients in pain. Macy quotes a letter from a friend with severe back pain from scoliosis. “‘My life is not less important than that of an addict,’ my friend wrote,…explaining that her new practitioner requires her to submit to pill counts, lower-dose prescriptions, and more frequent visits for refills, which increase her out-of-pocket expense.” Even more serious is a new shortage of opioids for injection in cancer centers.
For physicians, who are already weighed down by innumerable bureaucratic requirements, these restrictions present one more hoop to jump through, and many simply won’t do it. Instead, they’ll send the patient away with some Advil and hope it does the trick, even though they know it probably won’t. The regulations are having their intended effect. In Massachusetts, opioid prescribing has decreased by 30 percent. Meanwhile, the epidemic of street drugs continues apace. McGreal raises the possibility that reducing access to prescription opioids might feed the demand for heroin. Macy quotes an addiction specialist who laments that “our wacky culture can’t seem to do anything in a nuanced way.”
I believe the modern opioid epidemic is now more a demand problem than a supply problem. Three years ago, the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published an explosive paper about the surprising rise in mortality, starting at the turn of this century, among middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women. The increase was greater in women than in men. They found three main causes: drug and alcohol overdoses, suicide, and alcohol-associated liver disease. They later called these “deaths of despair,” because they were most common among workers in tenuous jobs, with only a high school education or less, who were struggling to stay afloat in isolated regions of the country. Dragged down by these deaths, in the past three years overall life expectancy in the United States has started to drop.
It’s not hard to see reasons for the despair. Most working-class Americans have not benefited from our booming economy, the fruits of which have gone almost entirely to the richest 10 percent. For the bottom half of the population, income has scarcely budged since the 1970s, while expenses for necessities like housing, health care, education, and child care have skyrocketed. In Appalachia, where the opioid epidemic first took hold, many coal miners were unemployed and would probably remain so. People expected they wouldn’t live as well as their parents had, and had little hope for their children. It is true that African-Americans still have higher overall mortality rates than whites, but that gap is closing rapidly for people under the age of sixty-five, particularly for women. By 2027, white women will have higher mortality rates than African-American women. Mortality for African-American men is falling even faster than for African-American women; it is projected to be equal to that of white men by 2030. But the epidemic has extended to all parts of the country and to all ethnic groups, so it’s unclear how the effects will be distributed in the future.
By the middle of this decade, the grotesque inequality in this country began to get the attention it deserves. And the growing awareness of that inequality fed the populist passion that, when twisted and distorted, produced the election of Donald J. Trump. It’s probably not coincidental, then, that the opioid epidemic got its second wind at about that time. It certainly marks the time when the opioids of choice changed from prescription drugs to the witches’ brew of street drugs. Did the epidemic explode because people were becoming aware that the American Dream was no longer theirs to dream?
As long as this country tolerates the chasm between the rich and the poor, and fails even to pretend to provide for the most basic needs of our citizens, such as health care, education, and child care, some people will want to use drugs to escape. This increasingly seems to me not a legal or medical problem, nor even a public health problem. It’s a political problem. We need a government dedicated to policies that will narrow the gap between the rich and the poor and ensure basic services for everyone. To end the epidemic of deaths of despair, we need to target the sources of the despair.


he Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with foreign labor. That process spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate priceswidens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.


OPIOID AMERICA: CHINA AND MEXICO PARTNER TO ADDICT AMERICA

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-opioid-war-on-america-chin

 OPIOID MURDERS BY BIG PHARMA


“While drug distributors have paid a total of $400 million in fines over the past 10 years, their combined revenue during this same period was over $5 trillion.”

“Opioids have ravaged families and devastated communities across the country. Encouraging their open use undermines the rule of law and will do nothing to quell their continued abuse, let alone the problems underlying mass addiction.”

Hayward: Fentanyl Is the Real Chemical Weapon Attack at the U.S. Border



Firefighters assess the health of a 35-year-old man who overdosed on heroin in Manchester, in the northeastern US state of New Hampshire
AFP/Don EMMERT
  176
6:19

The left is shrieking about President Donald Trump committing “war crimes” at the border by using tear gas to disperse a mob of violent migrants, while the media try very hard to keep anyone from remembering the sainted Barack Obama repeatedly did the same thing. All of these hysterics are curiously silent about thereal chemical weapons attack perpetrated at the U.S. border: the fentanyl epidemic.

Fentanyl is a powerful and deadly synthetic drug often mixed with other street drugs to make them more potent. It is largely manufactured in China and pushed across the porous southern border into the United States by Central and South American gangs. It kills tens of thousands of Americans every year.
Fentanyl is incredibly dangerous because of its potency, the poor quality control of the labs that make it, its tendency to induce respiratory failure, and its resistance to the emergency antidotes carried by first responders. Its potency makes it highly portable and its ever-changing formula makes it difficult for law enforcement to detect.
The Centers for Disease Control counted 72,000 overdose deaths last year. Fentanyl is believed to have played a role in nearly half of them nationwide, with much higher percentages in hot spots like Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Ohio. The CDC releaseda study in March that found fentanyl and similar synthetics are driving the increase in overdose deaths. The death rate from synthetics “more than doubled,” while overdose deaths from prescription opioids rose by 10.6 percent.
Media coverage and government policy for the opioid crisis is heavily focused on prescription drugs and their deep-pocketed, settlement-prone manufacturers and distributors, but the difference between a 10.6 percent increase in mortality rates and a surge of over 100 percent is stark. Fentanyl is by far the worst killer, followed by two other increasingly popular street drugs, cocaine and heroin, whose mortality rates increased by 52.4 percent and 19.5 percent respectively. Fentanyl passed other opioids as the most common cause of overdose deaths in 2016, and possibly even before that, since the exact type of drug involved in an OD is not always recorded on death certificates.
This is not just an American problem. Fentanyl was fingered as the primary culprit behind a 29 percent rise in overdose deaths in the United Kingdom last year. While fentanyl is seen as a relatively small part of the continental European illegal drug market, it still managed to kill at least 250 people there over the past two years, and there could be more uncounted deaths because European gangs have a habit of selling fentanyl disguised as prescription pain medication or heroin.
Fentanyl is so dangerous because it gets mixed into everything else by ambitious street dealers looking to juice up their products with a cheap and powerful additive. When a federal raid in October seized about 25 pounds of fentanyl from a drug ring in Lawrence, Massachusetts, U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling remarked it was enough fentanyl to “kill half the state.” The Ohio Attorney General figured 20 pounds of fentanyl seized in June could have caused four million fatalities. When state troopers bagged 118 pounds of fentanyl in May, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration calculated it was enough to kill over 26 million people.
“Fentanyl has taken over as the drug that is killing people here. When we go to a death scene and you still see the needle in the arm, we know it was fentanyl because it works that quick,” Madison County coroner Stephen Nonn said on Monday of the record-setting carnage in St. Louis.
Fentanyl is held responsible for a stunning 95 percent of the overdose deaths in St. Louis. “There really is no pure heroin in St. Louis anymore,” Brandon Costerison of the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse remarked. “We don’t know if folks are intentionally knowing that this is adulterated, or if it’s a lack of quality control on dealers contaminating stimulants with a very, very potent opioid.”
Few militarized chemical weapons could claim to be more lethal, pound for pound, and none of them have been deployed against civilian populations on the scale of fentanyl. The worst chemical weapons attack in Syria killed 1,500 people at most. The chemical attacksthat drew U.S. military action against the Syrian regime under President Trump killed several dozen civilians each. Fentanyl beats the Syrian dictatorship’s total nerve gas body count almost every week. A suitcase full of fentanyl is every bit as dangerous as the fabled “suitcase nukes” terrorists have thankfully failed to develop so far. Batches of heroin laced with too much fentanyl detonate like bombs and fill emergency rooms with corpses harvested from just a few city blocks.
“Even when you think you’re doing better, all it takes is one bad batch of fentanyl in any state and you’re going to have deaths,” Vermont health commissioner Mark Levine toldthe New York Times in August.
“The penetration of fentanyl into more heroin markets may explain recent increases in overdose deaths among older, urban black Americans; those who used heroin before the recent changes to the drug supply might be unprepared for the strength of the new mixtures,” the Times speculated, quoting experts who also feared a coming wave of deaths in the West from fentanyl mixed with black tar heroin.
Politicians and reporters paint the opioid crisis as a singular tragedy that began unfolding around the turn of the millennium, but addiction experts view it as three fairly distinct “waves,” beginning with a decade-long prescription drug abuse crisis that began subsiding in 2010, followed by a spike in heroin deaths until 2013, when fentanyl took over as the Grim Reaper. No one would argue that prescription opioids and heroin have ceased to be a problem, but fentanyl and its fellow synthetics are the big killers right now.
Daniel Horowitz at Conservative Review pictures the fentanyl crisis as a chemical weapons attack carried out by Chinese labs and drug cartel distributors against American civilians. He finds it no coincidence that the deadly third wave of the opioid crisis began after President Barack Obama’s “child migrant” surge of 2013-2015 swept gangs like MS-13 across the border and created the distribution network for fentanyl. He warns that loose immigration policy and prison reforms that could release a swarm of imprisoned dealers back onto the streets will only make the situation worse.
Is there a scrap of empirical evidence to prove this analysis wrong? On the contrary, skeptics keep catching government agencies manufacturing statistics to conceal the true lethality of imported street drugs and keep the focus on pharmaceuticals. Drug deaths are climbing despite enormous reductions in the prescription of opioids at the very painful expense of people who truly need them to combat chronic illness.
The spectacle of open-borders extremists portraying the use of tear gas to disperse riots at the border as “chemical warfare” is utterly grotesque when the real weapon of mass destruction is flowing north into American cities. Perhaps our friends on the left could take a moment away from their theatrical support of illegal aliens and spare a little of their vaunted compassion for the countless U.S. citizens murdered by fentanyl.

A NATION DIES OF OPIOID ADDICTION

AMERICAN BIG PHARMA, RED CHINA and NARCOMEX PARTNER FOR THE BIG BUCKS


“The drug epidemic is the product of capitalism and the policies of the capitalist parties, both Democrats and Republicans. There is, first of all, the role of the pharmaceutical companies, which have amassed huge profits from the deceptive marketing of opioid pain killers, which they claimed were not addictive. Prescriptions for opioids such as Percocet, Oxycontin and Vicodin skyrocketed from 76 million in 1991 to nearly 259 million in 2012. What are the numbers and profits now?

STARING IN THE FACE of AMERICA’S UNRAVELING and the ROAD TO REVOLUTION

It will more likely come on the heels of economic dislocation and dwindling wealth to redistribute.”
 “Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes.  This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” -- Karen McQuillan  THEAMERICAN THINKER.com

"The kind of people needed for violent change these days are living in off-the-grid rural compounds, or the “gangster paradise” where the businesses of drugs, guns, and prostitution are much more lucrative than “transforming” America along Cuban lines." BRUCE THORNTON

There can be no resolution to any social problem confronting the population in the United States and internationally outside of a frontal assault on the wealth of the financial elite. 

 The political system is controlled by this social layer, which uses a portion of its economic plunder to bribe politicians and government officials, whether Democratic or Republican.


Every CEO in every company sees the business opportunity: Will I earn higher profits by replacing my American staff with cheaper H-1B workers? The answer is an obvious yes.
The Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via mass-immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with foreign labor. That process spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate priceswidens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

PRINCETON REPORT:

American middle-class is addicted, poor, jobless and suicidal…. Thank the corrupt government for surrendering our borders to 40 million looting Mexicans and then handing the bills to middle America?


OPIOID MURDERS BY BIG PHARMA

“While drug distributors have paid a total of $400 million in fines over the past 10 years, their combined revenue during this same period was over $5 trillion.”

“Opioids have ravaged families and devastated communities across the country. Encouraging their open use undermines the rule of law and will do nothing to quell their continued abuse, let alone the problems underlying mass addiction.”


No comments: