> In an early 2018 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Christopher J. Ruhm, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Virginia, suggested that "the ‘deaths of despair’ framing, while provocative, is unlikely to explain the main sources of the fatal drug epidemic." He continued: "The fatal overdose epidemic is likely to primarily reflect drug problems rather than deaths of despair." Case and Deaton responded that they had explicitly tested and rejected his hypothesis, and that in their work "despair" was meant to be "a label, not an explanation."
We deindustrialized in the 80s and 90s. The spike didn't start until 2000, just after OxyContin came out. That's your guy.
The war in Afghanistan played a large part in this. Where do you think all the poppies came from to start mass producing oxycontin?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
Not only prescription opioids but heroin became a big problem again right around the early 2000's.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/afghan-heroin-...
>Until a few years ago, most heroin came from an opium-producing region in Southeast Asia called the "golden triangle," a mountainous area of around 350,000 square kilometres overlapping Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand.
>Roughly 92 per cent of the world's heroin comes from opium poppies grown in Afghanistan, according to the 2007 World Drug Report, released in June by the United Nations Office on Drugs.
>Afghan heroin typically flows into Canada through two main trafficking arteries, Mr. Nadeau said: via the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then onto India and, finally, Canada; and, from Afghanistan to western Africa, then through the United States into Canada.
The one thing the Taliban was actually pretty good about was getting rid of the poppy fields.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09553...
The cycle is: get hurt, get prescribed oxies. Either you or your kids or whoever gets addicted. The prescription runs out or you run out of money and you switch to heroin, which I can assure you, was widely available before the Afghan war. What makes it so deadly now is that it's frequently cut with Fent.
Fentanyl is far easier to smuggle because it's _so_ much more potent than other opiates. Buy a bunch of precursor from China, smuggle a few kilos over the southern border, bam.
In any case, the poppy supply was not the limiting factor on production of prescription opioids. There are two developments that have driven this crisis: prescription opioids and fentanyl.
The precursor is opium. Even synthetic opiates are derived from morphine, codeine and thebane directly extracted from poppies. In the case of oxycontin it's the thebane that's used. Thebane lacks the euphoric properties of morphine and makes you sick but is equally if not more addictive. Oxycontin is typically not smuggled across borders but sold by people with prescriptions. Everyone I know hooked on oxys buys them from the people with oxy prescriptions.
Fentynyl is cheap to produce and easy to smuggle in complete form. It's extremely potent and is extracted from unregulated fentynyl patches from China. These are stolen from hospitals etc, and are then processed to extract the fentynyl. This is then shipped on boats and such where it's easily concealed.
It ends up being cut into heroin or coke or some other drugs by local dealers to extend their supply. Suddenly that gram of heroin they sell is going to get someone high for 3 days instead of a few hours.
Most people od'ing on fentynyl aren't willingingly doing fentynyl, they're doing heroin or coke or something some asshole decided to cut with fentynyl.
Also I never claimed oxies were smuggled into the US, and I mentioned that people od because their heroin is spiked with Fent, so I'm not sure if you're trolling?
So, i've been trying to do some digging. It seems that this is the precursor to fentynyl
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/1-Benzyl-4-piperid...
According to these syntheses.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/fentanyl
Finding the precursor to N-Benzyl-4-piperidone was difficult but it seems to be partially this.
https://m.chemicalbook.com/ChemicalProductProperty_EN_CB9343...
Which is
https://www.spectrumchemical.com/OA_HTML/chemical-synonym_4-...
>is a derivative of piperidine used as an intermediate in manufacturing pharmaceutical drugs and chemicals
Which comes from black pepper
Some advice: move away from the use of privilege as a rhetorical device. It's a useful concept but it is virtually impossible to tell someone that they're privileged without making things contentious.