As 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.
3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.
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.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/ex...
Cigs are a product for kids
I'm not sure if drugs take away more overall years of life then tobacco, but the numbers are probably not that far off.
72,000 is just the number of sudden effects, ignoring the chronic long term effects of opiate abuse.
It the same thing with alcohol. Very few alcoholics die from alcohol poisoning, it's the long term health problems that kill them.
Actually I think the median death from alcohol is mid-30s, with alcohol-related accidents and suicides being more common than chronic health issues.
That we still haven’t done much about it is deeply distressing, tbh. I feel it’s a sign that we’re losing the ability to act towards unified goals, even politically safe ones like “no more drug overdoses please”.
Stopping drug overdoses is popular across the board, but some of the tactics to accomplish that are not. We aren’t even at step zero, pretending to give a shit at the national level.
You also need to factor in the victims, or rather their demographics. To be brutally honest, past victims of heroin were often minorities who lived in inner cities. Blacks in urban ghettos and gays cut off from all social support in particular, plus homeless people of all stripes. It was easy for people to pretend that those victims were simply immoral fools who got their just desserts.
Now the victims are increasingly the children of white, suburban, middle class families. This has brought the crisis much closer to the heart of American political power, and made it much easier for the average voter to know someone who is addicted to or died from opiates.
In theory this should reduce the drive for draconian drug war tactics, since the victims are neighbors and not brown boogeymen over in the big bad city. This doesn’t seem to be happening at the political level, which is weird and disconcerting.
We are at step zero, which is we have the capability of measuring the problem.
Lets be frank: there is plenty of people who care, and those people are providing those measurements (CDC analyzing death certificates, especially for Opioid deaths). Whether or not our leaders respond is simply a matter of democracy. We need to elect leaders who care and will do something about it.
But for now, step 0 is done. The public is becoming aware of the problem, and as far as I can tell, everyone is on the same page with regards to facts. Not even Trump dares to call these statistics "Fake News".
Over the next 10 years, I bet this problem will be solved. There really aren't any political headwinds that I foresee. There aren't any political opponents on this issue.
I don't know how you can be so rosy about the problem being solved within a decade when the war on drugs has been going on for many decades already.