Comment by Sanddancer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sanddancer | Hacker News Reader

Opioid addiction is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is a generation of people who are left behind, who don't have the mobility to go where the jobs are, who can't go back to school because there are no schools in the area. The disease is the minimum wage job at dollar general which keeps their employees at 28.5 hours to keep from having to provide all the social and economic obligations of maintaining a full time employee. The disease is a lack of psychologists who can treat the underlying despair and hopelessness caused by living in a dying county. The disease is a lack of physical therapists that can teach exercises to help keep the pain away. The disease is a complete lack of infrastructure that entraps people in these small towns. The disease is an employment system that ensure that a drug conviction from ten years ago precludes them from having any sort of decent job. The disease is stigma and stagnation. We won't stop this epidemic until we fix the broken system that let it happen in the first place, and that's going to take a lot more help and a lot more money than just blaming the doctors and drug companies.

>Opioid addiction is a symptom, not the disease.

That's an assumption on your part.

An alternate explanation is opioids have been overprescribed for decades now, and that people who've gotten hooked and then cut off by their doctors turned to illegal sources, and that as a result opioids are "around" in a way they haven't been since the 1960s and available for the more adventurous people to try.

From William S. Burroughs, a quote I often think about in this context:

"Statistically the people who become addicted to morphine are those who have access to it: doctors, nurses, anyone in contact with black market sources. In Persia where opium is sold without control in opium shops, 70 percent of the adult population is addicted. So we should psychoanalyze several million Persians to find out what deep conflicts and anxieties have driven them to the use of opium?"

This is obviously a very supply-side view of drug abuse and very likely an oversimplification. But so is the view that we should tackle underlying causes first ("fix the broken system") when there is an obvious legal pipeline openly pumping opiates into these states. This is particularly off-base as the effects of opioid addiction are now a secondary cause for more opioid addiction (i.e. 'everyone is doing it', 'there are now plenty of dealers', etc.). So much of this is a cycle. I don't disagree about treating the 'broken system' but turning off the pipeline at the corporate level is a huge opportunity to improve things.

When drugs are a problem in black communities, and the pushers are people of color, it's a criminal problem. And when it's a white problem, with corporate pushers, it's a problem of Big Systems which need fixing...

By all means, let's work on fixing unemployment and hopelessness in these United States. But let's feel free to shut down a couple brazenly unethical corporate outfits along the way.

I talk about the same thing when inner city drug problems are brought up to. The article isn't about the greater problem of the war on drugs, it's about the problem as it pertains to a very poor part of West Virginia. If you aren't going to fix the underlying problems, then bringing down the exploiters isn't going to do a damn thing, because more will just take their place.

First class!

It is in large part a cultural issue. I grew up in a rural town where a large portion of the population was drug addicted. Anti-intellectualism is rampant. I was literally the only person in town who had an interest in learning about computers. Everyone else thought they were for "nerds". The whole town was football crazy though.

The baby boomers also did an excellent job instilling sex, drugs and rock 'n roll as the core set of values in the west. Hedonism is glamorized, reading books not so much.

The infrastructure required to succeed in small towns exists. It's called the Internet and it's a one way ticket to success if you put the effort in to use it and have the strength to go against local culture.

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