Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

The mortality rate for white men and women ages 45-54 with less than a college education increased markedly between 1999 and 2013, most likely because of problems with legal and illegal drugs, alcohol and suicide, the researchers concluded. Before then, death rates for that group dropped steadily, and at a faster pace.

A graph in the article [0] shows a large spike in deaths by poisoning, a modest increase in suicides and chronic liver disease, no change in diabetes, and a decrease in lung cancer. So the authors quasi-conclude that the increase in this demographic is due to underlying psychic pain (tough times post-recession?) that causes people to overdose/die from alcohol poisoning.

There is a weird stat at the bottom of the article - according to the "National Heroin Task Force" (who knew there was such a thing) 110 people overdose on legal/illegal drugs every day. The CDC says that only 6 people die from alcohol poisoning every day. So if we take those stats at face value, which we probably shouldn't because the National Heroin Task Force has an incentive to overblow the problem, then we would conclude that heroin is a much larger problem than alcoholism across this demographic.

One other discrepancy was the author throwing in this strange citation that (supposedly) bemoans the future of Medicare:

"This is the first indicator that the plane has crashed," said Jonathan Skinner, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, who reviewed the study and co-authored a commentary that appears with it. "I don’t know what’s going on, but the plane has definitely crashed."

It's not often that you see this level of insightful journalism and deep analysis, so I took a moment to savor that nugget of knowledge. Then I wondered - isn't it a "good" thing for the Medicare system if the working class is dying off after contributing to the pot but before taking anything out?

[0] https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/Wash...

From experience, not every heroin overdose ends in death, so perhaps that explains it.

Though it's not a concern within my inner circle, I've studied the War on Drugs and to claim the "National Heroin Task Force" should be baseline accused of "overblowing" the problem shows, well, straight up ignorance. Currently, yes, it's a much more fatal problem than alcoholism. The toxicity of opiate addiction - and the unregulated black market for which to get heroin - is a deadly mixture of factors.

So as painkiller overdoses leveled off at about 16,000 in recent years, heroin deaths skyrocketed from just over 3,000 in 2010 to more than 8,200 in 2013, according to CDC data. Though all heroin users didn't necessarily start with painkillers, it's the transition from painkillers to heroin, Humphreys and other experts say, that led to the recent dramatic spike in heroin abuse.

Below is a link to a Vox article that presents evidence regarding the above quote, and the reason there's a heroin epidemic in the US is because of the overly aggressive (lobbied, and punished for dishonesty in marketing) pharmaceutical industry pushing opiate drugs. Now, with the crackdown on pills, there are wide, wide swaths of the US population who've gone from pills to the horse:

http://www.vox.com/2015/10/1/9433099/opioid-painkiller-heroi...

In addition, the war in Afghanistan significantly destabilized one of the world's largest opium producers, leading to much higher supply and thus lower prices. With heroin cheaper and more available, it is more easily seen as an alternative to opiate pharmaceuticals.

Yep, that points to the global aspect of the demand! However, from what I've read over the years of following the "Cartel Wars" down in Mexico, the Cartel De Sinaloa (re: Chapo Guzman and Mayo Zambada) have refined their production techniques to create much better quality heroin than in the past. Thus, they grow their own poppies, refine into heroin, and smuggle in using the routes they previously used for marijuana / cocaine / heroin. Other cartels may not have access to the fields and product, so CDS increases its power.

Cartel De Golfo, more in the cocaine trade. The former Knights Templar in Michochan, methamphetamine production (in part due to dealing with the Chinese - illegal mining in trade for access to precursors). Quite a fascinating development from what I've seen. Where there's profit to be made...

Excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths and 2.5 million years of potential life lost (YPLL) each year in the United States from 2006 – 2010, shortening the lives of those who died by an average of 30 years. Further, excessive drinking was responsible for 1 in 10 deaths among working-age adults aged 20-64 years. The economic costs of excessive alcohol consumption in 2010 were estimated at $249 billion, or $2.05 a drink.

So alcohol causes 10x the amount of deaths per year, and when you factor in economic damages caused by people operating machinery, driving, hurting themselves when drunk it seems like heroin abuse is neither a "much more fatal problem" nor a much more widespread problem than alcoholism. Faster growing, yes.

http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm

Care to balance out the statistics of the alcohol deaths with the number of people in the United States who use alcohol? I did a quick search and came up with this via the NIH:

In 2013, 86.8 percent of people ages 18 or older reported that they drank alcohol at some point in their lifetime; 70.7 percent reported that they drank in the past year; 56.4 percent reported that they drank in the past month... In 2013, 24.6 percent of people ages 18 or older reported that they engaged in binge drinking in the past month

...and, via the 2010 US Census, there are 193,000,000 people between the ages of 18 and 64.

So, if we consider the math, many, many more people consume alcohol than heroin, and as such, 88,000 is a much smaller "fatal problem" than you frame it. So, not as widespread as alcoholism, but much more fatal for those affected. I stand by my assertion that there's no need to "over-state" the heroin problem in the US.

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