The Addicts Next Door

 

I’m not sure if everyone will be able to read this; it isn’t paywalled for me, but I think that’s because you’re allowed to read a certain number of New Yorker articles for free every month, and I haven’t hit that limit yet. If you can read it, I recommend it. It’s called The Addicts Next Door, by Margaret Talbot, and It’s the best journalism I’ve read about the opioid epidemic:

One Thursday in March, a few weeks before Michael Barrett responded to Angel Holt’s overdose, I rode with him in his paramedic vehicle, a specially equipped S.U.V. He started his day as he often does, with bacon and eggs at the Olde Country Diner, in Martinsburg. Barrett, who is thirty-three, with a russet-colored beard and mustache, works two twenty-four-hour shifts a week, starting at 7 a.m. The diner shares a strip mall with the E.M.T. station, and, if he has to leave on a call before he can finish eating, the servers will box up his food in a hurry. Barrett’s father and his uncles were volunteer firemen in the area, and, growing up, he often accompanied them in the fire truck. As they’d pull people from crumpled cars or burning buildings, he’d say to himself, “Man, they doing stuff—they’re awesome.” When Barrett became a paramedic, in his twenties, he knew that he could make a lot more money “going down the road,” as people around here say, referring to Baltimore or Washington, D.C. But he liked it when older colleagues told him, “I used to hold you at the fire department when you were a baby.”

Barrett’s first overdose call of the day came at 8 a.m., for a twenty-year-old woman. Several family members were present at the home, and while Barrett and his colleagues worked on her they cried and blamed one another, and themselves, for not watching her more closely. The woman was given Narcan, but she was too far gone; she died after arriving at the hospital.

We stopped by a local fire station, where the men and women on duty talked about all the O.D. calls they took each week. Sometimes they knew the person from high school, or were related to the person. Barrett said that in such cases you tended “to get more angry at them—you’re, like, ‘Man, you got a kid, what the hell’s wrong with you?’ ”

Barrett sometimes had to return several times in one day to the same house—once, a father, a mother, and a teen-age daughter overdosed on heroin in succession. Such stories seemed like twisted variations on the small-town generational solidarity he admired; as Barrett put it, even if one family member wanted to get clean, it would be next to impossible unless the others did, too. He was used to O.D. calls by now, except for the ones in which kids were around. He once arrived at a home to find a seven-year-old and a five-year-old following the instructions of a 911 operator and performing C.P.R. on their parents. (They survived.)

I don’t think I have anything of wisdom to add to it, beyond encouraging you to read it. It’s what journalism ought to be. I’ve of course read hundreds of articles about opiate addiction crisis, and read the statistics, but I’ve never before been able to visualize how completely devastating this is to American small towns.

Some passages struck me, particularly:

Michael Chalmers is the publisher of an Eastern Panhandle newspaper, the Observer. It is based in Shepherdstown, a picturesque college town near the Maryland border which has not succumbed to heroin. Chalmers, who is forty-two, grew up in Martinsburg, and in 2014 he lost his younger brother, Jason, to an overdose. I asked him why he thought that Martinsburg was struggling so much with drugs. “In my opinion, the desperation in the Panhandle, and places like it, is a social vacancy,” he said. “People don’t feel they have a purpose.” There was a “shame element in small-town culture.” Many drug addicts, he explained, are “trying to escape the reality that this place doesn’t give them anything.” He added, “That’s really hard to live with—when you look around and you see that seven out of ten of your friends from high school are still here, and nobody makes more than thirty-six thousand a year, and everybody’s just bitching about bills and watching these crazy shows on reality TV and not doing anything.”

And this leaves me with questions. Why exactly do people in Martinsburg feel they have no purpose? What’s so shameful about making less than thirty-six thousand a year? (I consider that a “pretty good year,” personally.) Why do people stay there if they feel the place doesn’t given them anything? Why are they watching crazy shows on reality TV and not doing anything when they’re citizens of a superpower, free to go anywhere in the country — and to many other countries, too, if they feel like it — to start new lives?

What’s keeping people, in other words, in a mental prison?

So many questions come to my mind: Talbot intimates, but doesn’t explicitly state, that this is a disease of industrial decline. Do the data really confirm this? If we map towns and cities to regions that have experienced de-industrialization, do we see an invariable connection? Or do we see that some towns stay clean? If so, why?

The word “epidemic” is a metaphor. Obviously, opiate addiction isn’t contagious the way chickenpox is contagious — you don’t catch it through a virus or a similar physical vector; you can’t catch it just from being in physical contact with the afflicted person or their bodily secretions. But it does seem to behave, in some important ways, like a contagious disease: Being around addicts does seem to make you much more likely to become one; some cities and towns experience “outbreaks” — and your risk is much higher if you’re in a place that’s having an “outbreak.”

Shepherdson, Talbot says, “has not succumbed to heroin,” but that’s all she says about it, apart from noting that it’s “a picturesque college town.” (I found a photo of Shepherdson and posted it on the right.) I looked it up: It’s a tiny town with a population of 1,734. (The population of Martinsburg is 17,227.) Based on what she says, it’s hard readily to pronounce people in Martinsburg characterologically or even spiritually flawed, because it seems clear that if they were living in Shepherdstown, instead of Martinsburg, they wouldn’t be addicts. 

It sure doesn’t sound as if there’s much more to do in Shepherdson than there is in Martinsburg, or as if life is in any obvious way more full of promise and hope. It really does sound as if heroin addiction is more like a standard epidemic disease than a spiritual one: If you’re around it, you catch it.

When I looked up Martinsburg, I saw that it, too, is “picturesque,” which made me abandon my first thought — that perhaps something about a town being “picturesque” is really important here, that perhaps seeing ugliness around you rots your soul and robs you of hope. Martinsburg is shown above, on the left. The photo of the derelict Interwoven mill in the New Yorker made me think the town itself must look like an abandoned wasteland, but to judge from other photos of the place, it’s only the mill that’s depressing to look at. The rest of the town looks very attractive.  Martinsburg has four colleges and universities, which means it too could have just as easily been, and been described as, a “picturesque college town.”

The author and the people she interviews seem strongly to suspect that it’s the loss of industrial jobs that’s causing this. But I’m not sure what the mechanism is. The Interwoven mill closed in 1971. Most of the people who are now addicts were born long after the mill closed. I’m not saying they’re wrong to think there’s a connection: I trust that they’re the experts about what’s wrong with their town. I’m just wondering how it works, exactly, and why it takes so long for a town to go from de-industrialization to heroin addiction.

I find it mystifying: It is like a disease, but it isn’t really a disease. I personally wouldn’t be afraid of catching heroin addiction if I went to Martinsburg. It’s connected to something about contemporary American life, but it skips over towns like Shepherdson. Almost everyone who talks about it describes it as an affliction of hopelessness, yet it’s hard for me to see any objective reason for such hopelessness: People in Shepherdson, obviously, don’t find their lives so hopeless. No one is bombing Martinsburg. There’s no war, no famine. No one is preventing people from making friendships, falling in love, starting families, going to church, starting new businesses — and above all, no one is keeping them from leaving.

Yet unquestionably, something is keeping them there — and it’s killing them, in numbers you’d associate with war or famine.

It’s so depressing and dystopian that it’s hard to believe it could be happening: It’s like something out of the Twilight Zone.

What do you think is really going on?

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  1. Bryan G. Stephens Thatcher
    Bryan G. Stephens
    @BryanGStephens

    I am against the War on Drugs ™. I am also against total legalization.

    I do not believe we will be able to solve this issue overall, until we better understand the brain and can better treat the effects.

    By the way, Hep C making a huge comeback thanks to IV drug use.

    • #31
  2. Stina Inactive
    Stina
    @CM

    Valiuth (View Comment):
    Here is the conundrum for us Classical Liberals. People might benefit more from order and stability and once those break down they are hard to reestablish without some sort of centralized source of authority.

    Probably one of the only things you have said that I agree with. Balance is needed. And wisdom.

    • #32
  3. Fred Cole Inactive
    Fred Cole
    @FredCole

    Manny (View Comment):
    I can’t see how the situation would be better with legalization, but I certainly see how it could be worse.

     

    Prohibition makes things worse.  It’s like with the painkillers, when there’s a crackdown because its hard to get them, people turn to heroin.  Since heroin is illegal, it creates its own slew of problems:

    1. Users are not able to properly dose themselves, meaning its easier to overdose.
    2. Users are not ensured a regular or reliable product, which also makes it easier to overdose.
    3. It provides a revenue stream to organized crime.
    4. When people want to get clean, it’s harder for them to do so because they frequently have to deal with the criminal justice system in addition to everything else.
    5. If they’re arrested and get a criminal record, its harder for recovering addicts to get jobs or start businesses.
    6. We get to pay for it all.

    And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  I could keep going.

    Simply put: It’s not that it would create some utopia.  It’s that prohibition (1) doesn’t work and (2) causes more harm that good.

     

    • #33
  4. RyanFalcone Member
    RyanFalcone
    @RyanFalcone

    I love small towns. I don’t understand the disdain small town folks have for their “plight”. As a central planner, I see it all the time. Small town folks have an attitude of scarcity…”we don’t have anything here. We’re all just waiting to die.” City folks have an attitude of abundance…”Look at everything we have. Let’s live!” Yet city folks have often the most shallow and self-centered lives vs rural and small town folks? Regardless of where people live, the only happy ones I come across have good families and Spiritual lives. Drugs are everywhere and they seek the path of least resistance. Jobs and finances are a factor but not the biggest one IMO.

    • #34
  5. Valiuth Member
    Valiuth
    @Valiuth

    Stina (View Comment):

    Valiuth (View Comment):
    Here is the conundrum for us Classical Liberals. People might benefit more from order and stability and once those break down they are hard to reestablish without some sort of centralized source of authority.

    Probably one of the only things you have said that I agree with. Balance is needed. And wisdom.

    Sadly I don’t think balance and wisdom really exist in our political process anymore, and its structure I don’t think promotes either of those things at the moment.

    The wisest thing to do might be to do nothing, but that is also the least emotionally satisfying.

    I am always coming back to this point in my thinking. It maybe that in the end Marx was right, about where Capitalism was going. He was just wrong about the time frame. One of his central arguments was that capital would displace labor and in so doing create misery for the working man. His labor would earn him less and less. So to uphold his dignity and self worth you needed the government to control the economy. All throughout the industrial revolution growth seemed to take care of this issue. Is it possible we have reach a point where it can not?

    The other thing that keeps bouncing around in my head is perhaps we have been spoiled by our own success. We look at our poverty and see the hopelessness of working 30 hours a week to earn enough food to survive until we are 80 and think ourselves deprived. When by all historical standards we are blessed beyond belief. We expect things to improve all the time by radical amounts. But for most of history man lived with the same expectations. Maybe our expectations are wrong. If we expected less from life we might be happier? But that seems antithetical to the values that got us to where we are.

     

    • #35
  6. Kent Lyon Member
    Kent Lyon
    @NanoceltTheContrarian

    The citizens are likely not leaving because they have established contacts with benefits providers and would lose unemployment/welfare/disability/other benefits if they moved, and would have to re-establish their entitlement system network elsewhere (and since it would be the same, why move?). Or lose their drug dealer.

    In addition, they are told by the culture at large that they are like the Galtonian sheep on a well tended moor, fungible in their individuality, and irrelevant to anyone or anything beyond. They have lost their individual value in our collectivist society. Read Codevilla, the character of the nation is at an ebb. If you are told you are only of import to society as a potential welfare beneficiary, why would you try to do anything but watch reality shows?

    • #36
  7. Muleskinner Member
    Muleskinner
    @Muleskinner

    Stina (View Comment):

    Claire Berlinski, Ed. (View Comment):
    Why has this decimated Martinsburg but left Shepherdson untouched?

    What kind of jobs *are* available in these towns? I can’t find any information on that. Can we look at that? How do you do a study like that? How do you present that question to someone capable of finding out?

     

    The IRS’s big data centers are at Martinsburg.

    • #37
  8. I Walton Member
    I Walton
    @IWalton

    Valiuth (View Comment):

    Stina (View Comment):

    Valiuth (View Comment):
    Here is the conundrum for us Classical Liberals. People might benefit more from order and stability and once those break down they are hard to reestablish without some sort of centralized source of authority.

    Probably one of the only things you have said that I agree with. Balance is needed. And wisdom.

    The wisest thing to do might be to do nothing, but that is also the least emotionally satisfying.

    I am always coming back to this point in my thinking. It maybe that in the end Marx was right, about where Capitalism was going. He was just wrong about the time frame. One of his central arguments was that capital would displace labor and in so doing create misery for the working man. His labor would earn him less and less. So to uphold his dignity and self worth you needed the government to control the economy. All throughout the industrial revolution growth seemed to take care of this issue. Is it possible we have reach a point where it can not?

    He was wrong about almost everything.  Marx, at least in the Manifesto can be seen as a specific and incomplete example of Mancur Olsen’s “the logic of collective action”  His last book was “The rise and decline of nations”.  The upshot is that it is the centralization of authority through government by organized interests that brings civilization down.  There are few exceptions so Marxism provides a 19 century rationalization for that centralization.  Actually market economies can work things out, so far always because they are  examples of a Darwinian/Hayekian organic emergent processes.  Centralization  always gathers power to an ever narrower, self serving and gradually inept ruling elite.  The cases we’re dealing with here is that our centralized governments have erected barriers to that natural organic process by which free peoples deal with stress, change and hardship by the Smithian process of just adapting to the incentives people face.   If you don’t adapt and change, you get some of the results we’re discussing above. They erect those barriers  because that adaptive process always everywhere threatens their privileged perch.  This isn’t a product of capitalism it’s the way man behaves in groups and always has which freedom under the rule of law in our consitution attempted to manage and did for a quite a while.  And returning there is the only solution although perhaps too much for us.

     

    • #38
  9. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    Stina (View Comment):
    In the pioneering period, people who went west had a deed from the government giving them rights to a parcel of land. They had nothing in the cities and hoped for more out west. They didn’t move without some assurance of security (land).

    Thank you. I’ve wanted to say this a million times since I joined Ricochet. Those land grants were very helpful to people.

    Anyone who has ever read the Little House on the Prairie series would be acutely aware of that fact.

    The government–federal, state, and local–owns way too much land in this country. We need new towns. We need to open up our land supply.

    I blame that one thing more than any other for the entrenched poverty.

    But also computers are a real problem. You could move and escape a mistake you had made and get a fresh start. Not so anymore. The computers will follow you to the ends of the earth.

    It simply isn’t easy to move around anymore.

    • #39
  10. Isaiah's Job Inactive
    Isaiah's Job
    @IsaiahsJob

    Please allow me to add another perspective to this. I moved from North Carolina to San Francisco in 1988 with my childhood sweetheart; a beautiful but broken girl from Appalachia I’ll call “Anne” for privacy’s sake. Things started out okay for us in SF, but by the end of 1989 we were broken up and she was addicted to heroine. Later, as far as I can tell, she became a prostitute in the Tenderloin. This happened to a *shocking* number of boys and girls that moved to The City (as San Francisco was called back then), and it is probably happening there still.

    Based on what I’ve seen, there are four reasons why heroine addiction happens.:

    1. It’s there. By which I mean, it’s easy to get heroine. If it was difficult, things might be different.
    2. There’s people to do it with. Heroine is actually a social drug, with older junkies inducting new ones into the habit for a wide variety of (generally sinister) reasons. Like joining a cult, you drift away from non-junkies once you are one, because they really don’t understand what you’re going through.
    3. It’s pretty much a one-way trip: when you’re a junky, you’re a junky. Almost *nobody* kicks heroine, for both physiological and medical reasons. Maybe one in a hundred people can actually become clean once addicted. Maybe.
    4. Finally – and this is the hard one for many people – because evil exists in the universe as a conscious, entropic force. It likes alcoholism and drug addiction. Conversely, it doesn’t like self-reliance and independence.  It’s a real thing – and if it can creep into you, or your community, in the form of heroine addiction, it will. It finds destroying small, ethical, independent communities an especially sweet thing to do. Or doe-eyed, affectionate girls from North Carolina.
    • #40
  11. Arizona Patriot Member
    Arizona Patriot
    @ArizonaPatriot

    I think that there are multiple factors at work, which are interrelated, and it is hard to untangle root causes.

    1. The decline of religious faith.  Let’s face it, it is hard to find any meaning or hope in life without religious faith.
    2. Family breakdown.  One major contributor to this is welfare, which makes work a sucker’s game at the lower income levels.  If you can have the same lifestyle without working, what’s the point of trying?  But dependency inevitably undermines a person’s sense of self-worth.
    3. Sexual promiscuity.  In this, I include online porn.  I think that this may be a major contributor to unhappiness.  Andrew Klavan described it as something like this: sex comes to seem more important than the love it is supposed to express.
    4. Breakdown of community.  This may be an inevitable consequence of the automobile, which makes us so mobile that we’re not surrounded by a community of people who we know, and in which we have a valued place.
    5. Greater relocation of family members.  Family is the core of community, and if your siblings or cousins are spread all over the country, this core is gone.
    6. Increased ethnic diversity.  I’ve heard a little about work in this field by Robert Putnam, indicating that at least in the short term, ethnic diversity foster social isolation and distrust, even within ethnic groups.  Putnam is more optimistic about the long term effects, but I’m not sure of the extent to which this is wishful thinking.
    7. Multiculturalism and the decline in traditional American values.  Multiculturalism purports to be even-handed, holding that all cultures are equally good, but in practice seems to believe that traditional American values are uniquely bad.  This leads traditional, generally white Americans to have the sense that their way of life is under attack, that they are losing their country.
    8. Higher financial expectations.  Income has generally increased for all groups in America over the past 50-60 years, but our expectations grew also.  We come to expect bigger and better houses and cars, more and better entertainment, and improved health care.  All of this is very expensive, and makes it more difficult to maintain what we perceive as a decent, middle-class lifestyle.
    9. Greater income inequality.  While income for all groups has increased, it has increased most at the top.  There is a greater gap between the rich and poor, and perhaps more importantly between the rich and the broad middle.  Charles Murray has talked about the more conspicuous consumption of the wealthy as a loss of “seemliness.”  This could contribute to feelings of inadequacy for working class or middle class Americans, even if they are giving their families an objectively better life than a generation or two ago.
    10. Decreased job security.  There is a sense that it used to be easier to find a long-term, steady job.  I don’t know if this is true objectively, though I suspect it is.

    [Continued]

     

    • #41
  12. Arizona Patriot Member
    Arizona Patriot
    @ArizonaPatriot

    [Continued]

    I don’t have a brilliant solution.  It seems to me that Charles Murray, with his Coming Apart argument, gets it right.  People need a sense that they are members of a community, and hold a valued place in that community.  This position, frankly, seems to me to be more Leftist than Conservative, but I’ve become convinced that it is true.  The Libertarian or Conservatarian view of the self-reliant individual may not be in accord with our fundamentally social and tribal nature.  Actually, this may not be a problem for a traditional Conservative, as long as we draw the distinction between community and government.  In fact, increased government intervention may undermine true community.

    I’ve watched several seasons of Downton Abbey over the past week or so.  I am surprised by my emotional reaction to the way of life that it portrays.  The class distinctions are palpable, and highly objectionable to an American like me.  The social structure is rigidly hierarchical, headed by the “strong man,” the lord of the manor.  Yet this is tempered by the noblesse oblige and genuine kindness of the Earl of Grantham.  Most importantly, there is a real sense that each person has a valued place in the community.

    I realize that this is a romantic, even sentimental, portrayal of the British aristocracy, with a soaring musical score and bucolic countryside creating further emotional appeal.  I nevertheless get the sense that there is something very real, and essential, about the idea that each person needs to have a valued place in a local community.

    • #42
  13. TeeJaw Inactive
    TeeJaw
    @TeeJaw

    I recently read Dreamland: The True Tale Of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones. It contains a lot of information that I believe many of you will find enlightening if you haven’t already read it.

    Perhaps “enlightening” is not the right word since it intimates something good, even delightful. So change that to “endarkening” or “eye opening.” Or better yet, “Greater knowledge and understanding of a subject or situation.”

    Opiate and Opioid seem to have become interchangeable. Technically opiate refers to natural substances made from the poppy plant, heroin, opium and morphine. Opioid refers to synthetic renderings such oxycodone, hydrocodonde, fentanyl, etc. I guess “opioid” now covers the gamut. Quinones calls them all opiates, but it doesn’t matter.

    • #43
  14. Doctor Robert Member
    Doctor Robert
    @DoctorRobert

    Great article Claire.  Thank you for posting it.  The themes of modern American addiction are those that have ravaged our lower middle class since LBJ.  Fatherless families, loss of respect for marriage, lack of work, helplessness and especially, liberal pandering.

    My wife, also a Doc, works at a drug rehab hospital.  She works a LOT harder than I do and has MUCH harder patients.  I can’t get over how many of her patients are long term repeaters, spending a week four or five or more times a year drying out.  She has patients who have come in 40 times in five years for their “cure”.  This exposes the flaw of addiction treatment.  Addicts are not cured, only withdrawn.  Put them back home, on the street where they live, and they start right back up.

    The inability of the culture at large to deal with addiction is largely due to our holding too liberal a worldview.  An important element in the Opioid crisis is simple economics,  Supply and Demand.  There is a Demand; therefore there will be a Supply.  Where there is a Supply, dealers will always be looking to increase their businesses.  Demand creates Supply which then increases Demand.

    One aspect of the cure to the Opioid crisis, always overlooked, is obvious when you realize this.  If there are no suppliers, there is no meeting the demand.  Yet our placing a million young black American men in the revolving door of prison is not helping.  Our importing illegal aliens to deal drugs in not helping.

    This problem can be helped.  A society with stones could end this problem in a year.

    Saudi Arabia executes drug dealers.  There is little demand for illegal drugs in the kingdom of Saud.

    Iran executes drug dealers.  There is little demand for illegal drugs in Iran.

    Singapore executes drug dealers.    There is little demand for illegal drugs in Singapore.

    Just sayin’.

    • #44
  15. Brian Clendinen Inactive
    Brian Clendinen
    @BrianClendinen

    Doctor Robert (View Comment):
    Great article Claire. Thank you for posting it.

    My wife, also a Doc, works at a drug rehab hospital. She works a LOT harder than I do and has MUCH harder patients. I can’t get over how many of her patients long term repeaters, spending a week four or five times a year drying out. This exposes the flaw of addiction treatment. Addicts are not cured, only withdrawn.

    The themes of modern American addiction are those that have ravaged our lower middle class since LBJ. Fatherless families, loss of respect for marriage, lack of work, helplessness and especially, liberal pandering.

    The inability of the culture at large to deal with addiction is largely due to our holding too liberal a worldview. An important element in the Opioid crisis is simple economics, Supply and Demand. There is a Demand; therefore there will be a Supply. Where there is a Supply, dealers will always be looking to increase their businesses. Demand creates Supply which then increases Demand.

    One aspect of the cure to the Opioid crisis, always overlooked, is obvious when you realize this. If there are no suppliers, there is no meeting the demand. Yet our placing 40% of the young black men of America in the revolving door of prison is not helping. Our importing illegals to deal drugs in not helping.

    Saudi Arabia executes drug dealers. There is little demand for illegal drugs in the kingdom of Saud.

    Iran executes drug dealers. There is little demand for illegal drugs in Iran.

    Singapore executes drug dealers. There is little demand for illegal drugs in Singapore.

    Just sayin’.

    China executes them also.

    • #45
  16. Doctor Robert Member
    Doctor Robert
    @DoctorRobert

    Brian Clendinen (View Comment):

    Doctor Robert (View Comment):
    Great article Claire. Thank you for posting it.

    …One aspect of the cure to the Opioid crisis, always overlooked, is obvious when you realize this. If there are no suppliers, there is no meeting the demand. Yet our placing 40% of the young black men of America in the revolving door of prison is not helping. Our importing illegals to deal drugs in not helping.

    Saudi Arabia executes drug dealers. There is little demand for illegal drugs in the kingdom of Saud.

    Iran executes drug dealers. There is little demand for illegal drugs in Iran.

    Singapore executes drug dealers. There is little demand for illegal drugs in Singapore.

    Just sayin’.

    China executes them also.

    How’s the Chinese opioid problem?

     

    • #46
  17. Brian Clendinen Inactive
    Brian Clendinen
    @BrianClendinen

    Clair from a Social science prospective see if you can get the GINI index and wedlock birth rates for each city area. If you can find decent addict numbers localized to those regions run a simple regression analysis. I bet there will be a high correlation with both of those metrics that will be statistically significant if you can find enough data points. I would also bet the R2 will actually be pretty high therefore indicating the above two factors the key contributing factors. I would think the good fit would be much more from wedlock than GINI since GINI index numbers go up with wedlock birth rates.

    • #47
  18. Brian Clendinen Inactive
    Brian Clendinen
    @BrianClendinen

    Doctor Robert (View Comment):

    Brian Clendinen (View Comment):

    Doctor Robert (View Comment):
    Great article Claire. Thank you for posting it.

    …One aspect of the cure to the Opioid crisis, always overlooked, is obvious when you realize this. If there are no suppliers, there is no meeting the demand. Yet our placing 40% of the young black men of America in the revolving door of prison is not helping. Our importing illegals to deal drugs in not helping.

    Saudi Arabia executes drug dealers. There is little demand for illegal drugs in the kingdom of Saud.

    Iran executes drug dealers. There is little demand for illegal drugs in Iran.

    Singapore executes drug dealers. There is little demand for illegal drugs in Singapore.

    Just sayin’.

    China executes them also.

    How’s the Chinese opioid problem?

    They don’t have one and they don’t have a homicide or rape problem either because they execute them also. Violent crime in China is incredibly low from all the western I have ever talked with,  even though you can’t really trust official governmental stats. Granted they also execute a lot of other people to, like those you pass out religious literature.

     

    Heck if you know your history that is how the UK got Hong Kong. Parliament was looking the other way or out right pushing as trade policy for British merchant to sell opioids to the population. The Chinese kept demanding the British goverment crack down on this and stop it and aggressive tried to stop this trade. The British goverment pushed back and there were two wars and the Chinese lost both because of this.

    • #48
  19. SecondBite Member
    SecondBite
    @SecondBite

    Back in 1984, Ronald Reagan’s campaign slogan was “It’s Morning In America,” a positive, buoyant and successful theme.  The U.S. was also at that time struggling with a drug abuse epidemic, which may have been the genesis of the “War on Drugs.”  In a great essay, George Will called the President out, pointing out that almost all drugs that are abused are painkillers and asking (I’m paraphrasing from memory) “If it’s Morning In America, Mr. President, why do many need to anesthetize themselves?”  He said it better, of course.  There are always the usual sources of pain; spiritual, relational, physical, and so on, but I think that a huge one is insignificance.  It is evident to so many of us that we just do not matter any more.  I think people are meant to contend, but if we are intellectually disengaged, sedentary, and the government supports us and our families, there is nothing to contend with, to measure ourselves against.  Romance may be a necessity and our modern culture is killing it.

    • #49
  20. SecondBite Member
    SecondBite
    @SecondBite

    Brian Clendinen (View Comment):

    Doctor Robert (View Comment):

    Brian Clendinen (View Comment):

    Doctor Robert (View Comment):
    Great article Claire. Thank you for posting it.

    …One aspect of the cure to the Opioid crisis, always overlooked, is obvious when you realize this. If there are no suppliers, there is no meeting the demand. Yet our placing 40% of the young black men of America in the revolving door of prison is not helping. Our importing illegals to deal drugs in not helping.

    Saudi Arabia executes drug dealers. There is little demand for illegal drugs in the kingdom of Saud.

    Iran executes drug dealers. There is little demand for illegal drugs in Iran.

    Singapore executes drug dealers. There is little demand for illegal drugs in Singapore.

    Just sayin’.

    China executes them also.

    How’s the Chinese opioid problem?

    They don’t have one and they don’t have a homicide or rape problem either because they execute them also. Violent crime in China is incredibly low from all the western I have ever talked with, even though you can’t really trust official governmental stats. Granted they also execute a lot of other people to, like those you pass out religious literature.

    Is this a post hoc fallacy?  The assumption is that those societies would have a drug use epidemic if they did not execute offenders.

    • #50
  21. Bryan G. Stephens Thatcher
    Bryan G. Stephens
    @BryanGStephens

    I wish we could be far less liberal/libertarian when it comes to addicts. They are not longer rational actors and no longer at liberty, as they are slaves to their drug of choice. I have seen drug courts work well, but it takes up to two years of carrot, stick and treatment. They are expensive, and do not get everyone. They do have great outcomes.

    So, I am saying I’d like to accept the loss of liberty that has already happened with the addicts, and force them upon a path towards recovery. If they cannot manage that, then they should not be allowed in society, to present ongoing danger to the rest of the population.

    Now, if I figure out a way to do that, and not have it slide into a total arbitrary mess, where those in power abuse those who are not, I’ll get back to you.

     

    • #51
  22. SecondBite Member
    SecondBite
    @SecondBite

    Bryan G. Stephens (View Comment):
    I wish we could be far less liberal/libertarian when it comes to addicts. They are not longer rational actors and no longer at liberty, as they are slaves to their drug of choice. I have seen drug courts work well, but it takes up to two years of carrot, stick and treatment. They are expensive, and do not get everyone. They do have great outcomes.

    So, I am saying I’d like to accept the loss of liberty that has already happened with the addicts, and force them upon a path towards recovery. If they cannot manage that, then they should not be allowed in society, to present ongoing danger to the rest of the population.

    Now, if I figure out a way to do that, and not have it slide into a total arbitrary mess, where those in power abuse those who are not, I’ll get back to you.

    I have long thought that there are certain lines that, once crossed, should provoke swift and certain action.  Parental child abuse is the most obvious:  do certain things to your children and you are unfit and will never ever see them again.  I hadn’t thought of drug addiction as another of the same class of behavior.   A declaration of social incompetence that requires forced re-education?  Maybe so.  Who judges?

    • #52
  23. Larry3435 Inactive
    Larry3435
    @Larry3435

    I would be interested to see how opiate addiction in a given community correlates to the number of claims for Social Security Disability Insurance.  The most recent statistics I have found say there are more than 10 million recipients of SSDI in the US, up more than 500% since 1970.  As an explanation for how people get locked into lives of despair – unable to return to the work force, unable to relocate, and unable to find any meaning or dignity in their lives – SSDI seems to me to be as plausible as anything else.  A generation ago, if your town was dying you pulled up stakes and moved elsewhere.  Now, if your town is dying, you call up your local ambulance chaser and put in your claim for disability.  Maybe the problem with Martinsburg is too many ambulance chasers doing their jobs too effectively.

    • #53
  24. Claire Berlinski, Ed. Member
    Claire Berlinski, Ed.
    @Claire

    Valiuth (View Comment):
    It maybe that in the end Marx was right, about where Capitalism was going

    I know. The forbidden thought. But it goes through my head all the time these days. And honestly, anyone who says it isn’t … probably hasn’t read Marx.

    • #54
  25. Claire Berlinski, Ed. Member
    Claire Berlinski, Ed.
    @Claire

    Larry3435 (View Comment):
    would be interested to see how opiate addiction in a given community correlates to the number of claims for Social Security Disability Insurance.

    I would be, too. It’s certainly worth looking into. I wonder if there’s someone doing that research, or if it’s been done, and if so, where to look for it?

    • #55
  26. Muleskinner Member
    Muleskinner
    @Muleskinner

    Claire Berlinski, Ed. (View Comment):

    Valiuth (View Comment):
    It maybe that in the end Marx was right, about where Capitalism was going

    I know. The forbidden thought. But it goes through my head all the time these days. And honestly, anyone who says it isn’t … probably hasn’t read Marx.

    The Soviets did much the same thing with vodka, at least, not great Capitalists.

    • #56
  27. Claire Berlinski, Ed. Member
    Claire Berlinski, Ed.
    @Claire

    Brian Clendinen (View Comment):
    Clair from a Social science prospective see if you can get the GINI index and wedlock birth rates for each city area. If you can find decent addict numbers localized to those regions run a simple regression analysis. I bet there will be a high correlation with both of those metrics that will be statistically significant if you can find enough data points. I would also bet the R2 will actually be pretty high therefore indicating the above two factors the key contributing factors. I would think the good fit would be much more from wedlock than GINI since GINI index numbers go up with wedlock birth rates.

    Very good suggestions. But again, I wonder if I’d be reinventing the wheel: surely someone has done this already?

    • #57
  28. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    Fred Cole (View Comment):

    Manny (View Comment):
    I can’t see how the situation would be better with legalization, but I certainly see how it could be worse.

    Prohibition makes things worse. It’s like with the painkillers, when there’s a crackdown because its hard to get them, people turn to heroin. Since heroin is illegal, it creates its own slew of problems:

    1. Users are not able to properly dose themselves, meaning its easier to overdose.
    2. Users are not ensured a regular or reliable product, which also makes it easier to overdose.
    3. It provides a revenue stream to organized crime.
    4. When people want to get clean, it’s harder for them to do so because they frequently have to deal with the criminal justice system in addition to everything else.
    5. If they’re arrested and get a criminal record, its harder for recovering addicts to get jobs or start businesses.
    6. We get to pay for it all.

    And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I could keep going.

    Simply put: It’s not that it would create some utopia. It’s that prohibition (1) doesn’t work and (2) causes more harm that good.

    All studies show that when you legalize a substance and no longer make it a taboo, then use goes up substantially.  Now one can make the argument that the cost of doubling the population of addicts (and it may be more than doubling, but let me use that)  has a cost benefit since you no longer have to pay for the prosecution.  I can understand that argument and I don’t have the cost benefit analysis to know, but the additional destruction of people’s lives would say that on a moral level we should not create policies that lead to more people destroying their lives.

    And who says prohibition doesn’t work.  People always refer to alcohol prohibition, a substance that was integrated into the mainstream of culture for millennium.  We’re now talking about substances that have never been sanctioned as acceptable.

    • #58
  29. Claire Berlinski, Ed. Member
    Claire Berlinski, Ed.
    @Claire

    Doctor Robert (View Comment):
    This problem can be helped. A society with stones could end this problem in a year.

    Saudi Arabia executes drug dealers. There is little demand for illegal drugs in the kingdom of Saud.

    I’m not sure that it’s true there’s little demand. In fact, from what I’ve heard, it’s quite a problem:

    Captagon: ‘Breaking Bad’ in Saudi Arabia

    ‘40% of young Saudi drug addicts taking Captagon’

    Is Saudi Arabia losing the battle to combat substance abuse?

    • #59
  30. Claire Berlinski, Ed. Member
    Claire Berlinski, Ed.
    @Claire

    Isaiah's Job (View Comment):
    by the end of 1989 we were broken up and she was addicted to heroine. Later, as far as I can tell, she became a prostitute in the Tenderloin.

    That’s an awful story. It must have been a terrible thing to go through, and I assume it’s still painful to think about. I’m so sorry.

    • #60
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