Commenting on:Let's Go For A Win On Opioids

Bravo to David Brooks and his take on the larger issue, and...

...for being a rare voice that cites an increasingly exigent crisis. He manages to pull the lens farther back to frame a bigger picture: addiction as the insidious disease it has been conclusively and clinically found to be. It is cunning, baffling, and fatal.

It's a jarring fact that opioids are universally addictive in that there is no requirement for either distinct genetic predisposition or personal predilection toward abuse, and the recent exponential increase in their effected fatality numbers is abject and stultifying.

But Mr. Brooks nevertheless points with unabashed certainty toward an issue that so many others avoid for fear of piquing uncomfortable cognitive dissonances.

A three fold increase to 33,000* (* Updated since 2017: Opioid-involved overdose deaths rose from 21,088 in 2010 to 47,600 in 2017 and remained steady in 2018 with 46,802 deaths. This was followed by a significant increase through 2020 to 68,630 overdose deaths.) opioid related deaths last year is, dare I say it, sobering; 

but that figure is still less than half the seemingly accepted death rate from the culturally well-marbled alcohol usage, which claims 88,000+ US lives annually.

(Updated since 2017: *Opioid-involved overdose deaths rose from 21,088 in 2010 to 47,600 in 2017 and remained steady in 2018 with 46,802 deaths. This was followed by a significant increase through 2020 to 68,630 overdose deaths.)

These figures do not include the psychic plight and social ills endowed by the disease during its active and progressing stages: hobbled spirits, wounded relationships, traumatized families, lost wages and productivity, extreme and needlessly burdensome health care costs.

It's my firm belief that the "one drink a day" health benefit findings are direct plays upon alcoholic rationalization endemic within the addict and thereby utilized as a prophylactic narrative perpetuating the drinker as the valued ongoing customer in a multi-billion dollar industry. 

It's encouraging to see Mr. Brooks point out that addiction, as an acute disease, is slow suicide operating at varying rates depending on the individual sufferer, the circumstances and drug(s) of choice. But the core drivers are despair, blight and anxiety which saliently present themselves as endemic to the darker and more hopeless gulches of our economic landscape. A vicious downward spiral is created, one that manufactures more and more pain for the addict internally and externally.

It's nevertheless encouraging that there's an aspiring nod toward political agendas that might address the over-arching causes of this blight writ large.


Not mentioned in the piece is an interesting and telling statistic: some European countries--Germany and France among them--have higher per capita alcohol consumption, yet an overall lower fatality rate.

More plainly, and at least as far as booze is concerned, the French and Germans drink more than us but fewer die.

Could that be partly due to their citizens having less of the pervasive background anxiety and stress that we here in America experience in the face of our record high health care costs, child care costs and the more and more for-the-more privileged system of continued education? That's another subject for discussion, but an arguably closely related one.

I'll hazard the observation that we Americans live in a more stressful society than those in more socially supportive and more self-investing nations.

Bravery is required. Any recovering addict knows it, and it would be refreshing for well placed apt leaders to accept and step up accordingly to create a new season of understanding and proactive measures that may enable a change in our approach to mollifying the societal effects of chronic substance abuse.

That some social conservatives immediately seize the opportunity to pivot from the subject of opioids to weed legalization issues seems to me clueless and irritatingly tone deaf.

Drugs and vice are here to stay, for better and for worse. But our species will continue to evolve if we so allow.

Perhaps the more urgent and dramatic scourge of opioids is another type of gateway, one that might open higher minds to formulate and legitimize efforts toward a more enlightened culture with universal benefits for all. In our deliberative hearts and minds, there is much room for improvement.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/opinion/lets-go-for-a-win-on-opioids.html