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The statistical noise of opioid deaths is the depressing part?

I would have some vague sympathy for your argument were it not for the fact that death is far from the only negative consequence.

Opioid addiction is a lifelong curse.

For anyone interested, here is how the US has done. Not great since 2000, pretty great before that. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/infa...

Infant mortality is pretty good too, yes. But I was using the entire 0-18 year old range of US citizens. And now that we're down to just a trickle of preventable childhood deaths the relative proportion of deaths to drug overdoses and firearms is higher but even those per capita numbers are significantly lower than the ~1960s.