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Overdose on Guns
From Robert VerBruggen, at Real Clear Policy, this simple graph:
Three reactions:
- I have no idea what explains the steep drop in motor vehicle deaths. I haven’t noticed people driving more safely since 2006. Have you? Could it be gas prices leading to fewer cars on the road? (But gas prices have been dropping …)
- Gun deaths seem to be constant. So, another mystery: Why are lefty progressives acting like it’s an epidemic?
- Drug overdose deaths are skyrocketing. Why isn’t Barack Obama having town meetings about that?
Thanks!
huh?
He’s pointing out that the sharp drop off in road fatalities (beginning in 2006) has no time-correlation with air bags, crumple zones, or mandatory seat belt use.
The rise in overdose deaths can be blamed on the drug war plus the rise of opiod prescription drug abuse. My wife works in this field, and the demographic of drug overdoses has changed dramatically in the past few years. The average age has gone up, as has the socioeconomic class of the victims.
Thirty years ago, the typical overdose victim might have been a 20-something habitual drug abuser who dies at a party after injecting heroin or cocaine. Today, it’s more likely to be a 45 year old middle class person overdosing on oxycontin or something like that.
A huge rise has occurred in just the last couple of years, because a drug called fentanyl has entered the black market in a big way. It’s about 40 times more powerful than heroin, and it’s killing people at an alarming rate. It’s caused such a spike in overdose deaths that many provinces and states have created emergency action plans to attempt to curb it.
As for why the left isn’t interested in drug overdose deaths: A) it doesn’t fit their chosen narratives, and B) there’s no constituency that can be leveraged into votes.
Right, I misread “were not invented in 2006” as if they had not yet been invented. My mistake.
Not invented, but their use expanded and their designs improved is certainly possible. Give a couple years lag for them innovations to get into the world. Wikipedia tells me that side-impact airbags were developed in 1994 by Volvo, but that as late as 2009 they were not standard on all cars. The big roll-out seems to have been 2008 or so.
Some of this could be demographic. An aging population doesn’t drive as recklessly and doesn’t murder as often, but it could be more suicidal.
As for drug overdoses specifically, there have been innovations there, too. Designer drugs, the expansion of meth production and the development of meth that can be produced outside a lab, and the aforementioned expansion in the black market for prescription drugs.
The bulk of the reduction in the motor vehicle death rate – according to the graph – occurred in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Eyeballing it, the reduction during this short time period appears to be around 25%.
That is a remarkable drop, particularly given the trends in cellphone usage while driving. Therefore, one of two things is true:
By the way, a friend of a friend once took a fatal dose of drugs and then shot himself while driving, causing the car to go off a cliff, Thelma and Louise-style. How would that death be categorized?
Would be counted as a gun death I’m sure. So here is another interaction between the categories. The chart shows deaths due to drug overdoses has overtaken both car and gun deaths, and is on a steep rise. I believe drug use has contributed to the gun deaths staying level, otherwise it would be falling. Why do I say that? If you look into the gun deaths you will see that murders are down but suicides are growing up to where it is now two-thirds of the gun deaths! The correlation between mass shootings and drug use is nearly 100%. I suspect the same correlation in suicide.
Stability control may be a major factor here. One of the most common forms of single-vehicle accident fatalities occurs in rollover accidents involving SUVs. Stability control prevents this, and has apparently cut single-vehicle accidents by more than 50%, and multi-vehicle accidents by over 11%.
Add to that better handling of new vehicles, the use of high-strength steel to reinforce roll cages around the occupants, lane departure warning systems and other new safety devices that have been introduced in the past few years, and it probably adds up.
Almost none of this was mandated by government. Auto safety is a great example of how the market can work without the government’s help – almost no vehicles on the road today are built to minimum government safety specs.
Have a look at this video, in which an idiot races through a tunnel without being able to see the road on the other side. He comes out of the tunnel into a curve, panics and hits the brakes, and causes a snap oversteer that throws his car over a very steep embankment, and it goes nose over tail down the hill until it hits a concrete drainage channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5NWcdq4Wf4
This would probably have been a fatality or at least caused severe injuries in a car 20 years ago – in this one, the vehicle hardly looks damaged at all, and the driver walked out of it just fine. Notice the passenger cabin is completely intact, and the driver was swaddled in front, seat side, knee, and side curtain airbags.
Probably engineering. Designing in safety has been a priority the last couple of decades.
It’s genetic to the leftist body politic.
The whole softening on drug policy that has been ongoing for the past decade has finally caught up. To say that legalizing pot has no effect on the overall view of drugs is a fallacy. The war on drugs works. It reduces the use of drugs and creates a sharp boundary in people’s psyche as to what is licit and what is illicit. More people are experimenting with drugs.
Au contraire, it has been a complete and utter failure.
But that requires a post in itself. Manny, why don’t you do a post on the success of the drug war and then I and others can comment, I’m serious.
Yeah that’s your Libertarian persuasion deluding you. Libertarians keep saying the war on drugs is a failure, but they have lost sight why there was a war on drugs to begin with. That chart at the top of this page is evidence enough. As you take pressure off stifling the use of drugs, as you make them more acceptable, the more drugs people take, the more deaths and broken people and broken families.
Drug use is bad, but the unintended consequences of the war on drugs is worse than drug use. But this is a big complicated issue that needs lots of data review.
I routinely see, up close, vehicles that have been involved in accidents, through my work. It is crystal clear that modern cars are designed very well to protect the contents. the passenger compartments truly are cocoons that survive pretty incredible impacts, while the parts of the car outside the cocoon are designed with impact zones. Modern cars are much more quickly “totaled” than older designs, with the passengers suffering only minor injuries. Modern car design is based on the idea of protecting the passengers, and forgetting about the rest of the car. Also, of great importance is the advancements in emergency treatment, transportation, training and equipment. That’s huge.
Also interesting is the impact those same medical advances have had on gun deaths. But those figures are heavily influenced by other things – suicides, which really shouldn’t be counted, and gang violence. And many compilers of such statistics also lump in police shootings, with no regard for the reason the police shot someone. And shooting deaths resulting from valid personal defense are almost never segregated in the statistics. That topic is well – addressed elsewhere on Ricochet. Factor those things in, and the decrease in gun violence would be pretty remarkable.
For a host of reasons I have a hard time convincing myself that legalizing drugs would lead to a decrease in drug-related deaths. I’ve seen too many wasted dead people. I see too many wasted living (barely) people.
Yes, I understand the desire to cave in on the drug war. It does cost money, but what is the human and societal cost as a result?
Cigarette smoking was at near 50% at its height. It took authoritative laws and heavy taxes to now bring down to about 20%, I think it is. Would we be better off today if cigarettes had been outlawed, and so reduced the smokers down to around 5%? Will making illicit drugs socially acceptable cause use to go to say 20%? Even if it’s ten percent, what kind of a nation will we be if one out of ten people get stoned regularly? What will that do to families and the virtue of our youth, let alone health?
I don’t want to see the consequences of not having a war on drugs.
The chart tracks deaths nor usage. Actually…
Illicit drug use in on the decline or level,
and abuse of prescription drugs is skyrocketing.
That chart on illicit drugs was for children. For adults there is an increase, and depending on which age catagory a significant increase. An it’s interesting to note that while cigarette smoking has gone down with great effort, drug use has not gone down. That disconnect suggests that we need to do the same type of authoritarian approach to drugs, not loosen up.
And even if you legalized pot, how in good conscience could you not continue the war on heroin and cocaine? You can’t possibly suggest you want to end the war on those drugs.
The biggest factors for fewer vehicle related deaths are a massive decrease in drunk driving, safer vehicles and improved road and highway design and maintenance. The numbers would be even more strikingly low if pedestrian, bicyclist and work zone-related deaths weren’t rising so much in recent years. I predict that within 20 years we will see an entire year where there isn’t a single fatal car crash in one of our states (not including pedestrians/bicyclists).
You are not understanding my position. There are lots of options between the two extremes. I am speaking of decriminalizing personal drug use.
YES! See, we actually agree after all. Let’s do just like cigarettes: decriminalize, tax heavily, regulate sales, and educate against.
Or we could treat cigarettes like drugs, criminalize it, have mandatory prison sentencing, lose your house if you are caught with cigarettes, turn the police to where their primary duty is to fight cigarette smoking, use SWAT teams to catch cigarette users, cause a decades long domestic war that transformations the relationship between the police and citizens, inadvertently cause the creation of huge organized cigarette cartels with revenues of $320 billion a year, create an underground cigarette industry so powerful that it influences most of the governments in central and south America, create the primary source of income for several terrorist organizations, destroy more lives and even countries than drugs alone could possibly do and I’ve only just started. The full list is so depressing that I will not share it.
It’s sending a mix message. The direction of action is important. Tightening cigarette laws is a direction toward elimination. Legalizing pot is a direction for acceptance. Plus cigarettes have been what I’ll call “enculturated” into society, that is a part of the culture. Pot hasn’t. Once enculturated like alcohol in prohibition it is impossible to reverse course. Keep pot on the outside of social acceptance. It creates a psychological boundary.
Causal pot use has already been decriminalized. I don’t think it’s working, but the full results will probably in in another five years. Are you suggesting we decriminalize heroin use? I guess you are suggesting we end the war on heroin and cocaine.
You made some mixed assumptions.
You are enthused on this topic. Make a post. I think your “authoritarian approach” to personal choices that do not involve any other person, is probably inconsistent with modern conservatism and even religious individual free will. It would certainly be in conflict with classical liberalism and libertarianism. By the bye, I think modern conservatism is classical liberalism.
The human and social cost of the drug war? Well, let’s see…
A) 208,000 people are currently in state jails for non-violent drug offences. Another 96,000 are in federal prison for non-violent drug offences. That’s a lot of ‘social cost’. But that’s just the beginning:
B) The destabilization of governments due to drug cartels and the profitable U.S. black market they supply is partly responsible for the mass influx of illegal immigrants from those regions.
C) The human cost in lives from drug-cartel related violence around the world is staggering.
D) The Taliban is funded in part from the illicit opium trade.
E) Much of the violence in large cities is gang-related, and those gangs are almost always the result of the illegal drug trade.
F) The inner cities have been depleted of young men who are in jail for drug offences, dead from gang violence, or jailed because of violence resulting from gang activities. This has contributed to the destruction of family values in the African American community and we’re seeing the results today – and they are terrible.
G) State and federal spending on the drug war is running about $40 billion annually. That’s more than twice the budget of NASA. Since Nixon declared the war on drugs, government in the U.S. has spent over a trillion dollars, with no discernable effect other than the militarization of police forces, the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of people who didn’t hurt anyone but themselves, and all the other negative effects listed above.
Who says they have to be socially acceptable? The real reason smoking has decreased isn’t because of laws or taxes, but because smoking became socially unacceptable in most circumstances. After all, cigarettes are still perfectly legal, and nowhere near as expensive as drugs, yet cigarette smoking has declined dramatically as you pointed out.
It’d have to be pretty darn bad before it would outweigh the real, measured harms that have been caused by the drug war (as opposed to the theoretical harms that might occur through drug legalization).
Let me give you a very specific example of how the drug war is killing people:
Fentanyl is a very strong opiod – at least 40 times stronger than heroin. Because you can’t get it legally without a prescription, the drug cartels are making it and smuggling it into countries around the world. The easiest way to do this is to make a counterfeit pill press and press it into pills that look like other, legal opiods like Oxycontin. So people are buying bags of pills that look like regular painkillers, but are 40 times stronger than heroin. This stuff gets accidentally taken by people who think they’re just taking an Oxy, and it kills them. Also, heroin dealers are improving their yields and the reported quality of their stuff by cutting it with fentanyl. If the user doesn’t know this and takes his normal dose, he can overdose and die.
In my province alone, 120 people died last year from fentanyl-related overdoses. Across the world, fake oxycontin fentanyl pills are killing tens of thousands of people per year. These are a complete artifact of the war on drugs.
These are typically not hard-core drug users, by the way. Often, they are normal people who get hooked on Oxycontin after being prescribed the drug after surgery, and then when their prescription runs out they start to withdraw and seek out oxycontin on the black market when their doctor refuses to renew the prescription (usually due to pressure from drug warriors worried about prescription drug abuse). Sometimes that oxycontin is fentanyl, and there’s no way to tell. So the person goes home, and takes what they think is a prescription pain pill, and they die. Or sometimes, a family member with some pain will see a bottle of ‘oxycontin’ and take one – and die.
There is a drug (Naloxone) that you can take that will neutralize the fentanyl and save the lives of the people who are overdosing, but it’s proving to be very hard to distribute Naloxone kits to at-risk populations, because the drug warriors think this will just encourage more drug use. I guess they’d rather let innocent people die in large numbers than take the risk that someone, somewhere, might take a drug recreationally.
So what am I hearing? That heroin should be decriminalized? Let’s see, if the population of heroin users goes up to 1% because of legalization – and that’s a low estimate – then you would have an additional 900,000 users. That’s just heroin. Yes, we can reduce the penalties for non violent offenses, but what you’re advocating is greater use, resulting in more destroyed lives and a poorer culture.
Yes, please decriminalize drug use, but that is not the same as what you envision as legalization. You are still portraying binary options.
Without making specific policy proposals, I would suggest we start by at least acknowledging the tremendous cost of the war on drugs, and base any future sane drug policy on a proper balance between those harms and the potential risk of increased drug usage.
How about instead of criminalizing heroin use as a felony we treat it like alcoholism? If you get caught with Heroin you might do a little time (days or weeks, not months or years), plus treatment of addiction and education. At the same time, start a public education campaign on the dangers of various drugs, and encourage your supporters to approach the problem exactly like cigarettes through using social pressure and messaging to encourage people to leave drugs alone.
I would advocate slow and gradual reforms, always taking time to evaluate their effect before moving on. If the equation moves across the line into increased harm to society, we can pull back from that.
Harm reduction and education would be my prime tools in the ‘drug war’ – not force and long-time incarceration.
Decriminalizing anything has shown to increase use. No, I would not support decriminalizing heroin.