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Comment by ljw1001 | Hacker News Reader

> The decline in life expectancy is occurring in part due to deaths from despair. From 2007 to 2017, the mortality rate from drug overdoses increased 82%

This is a perfect example of how corporate greed (and a political system that now mostly exists to support it) is ravishing the American people. After decades of obvious abuses, the company pushing OxyContin is finally being stopped, but no one is going to jail (see: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/19/762455218/as-drugmakers-face-...), and although the company is bankrupt, we're merely locking the barn door after the billions have escaped.

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The pharma companies are merely a useful scapegoat for the real cause: awful state policies. This is blatantly obvious after only a small amount of research, like the fact that opioid overdoses have increased as opioid prescriptions have decreased.

The government restricting the supply of opioid painkillers has only served to push those who need them into the black market. Blaming companies like Purdue is only playing into the same talking points as the drug warriors: evil dealers pushing dangerous drugs onto innocent people.

We need to decriminalize and legalize all drugs: possession, creation, and distribution.

> The government restricting the supply of opioid painkillers has only served to push those who need them into the black market

This is a pretty shallow summary of the actual state of affairs. Yes, people who need drugs have been forced into the black market. But so have people who are addicts. Legalizing might or might not help, but it doesn’t help to pretend that everyone is a chronic pain sufferer.

The reality is that for decades many people were handed highly addictive painkillers for relatively minor pain (and for too long for acute pain). The end result is an epidemic of addiction. Those addictions didn’t evaporate when doctors started to reduce the frequency of opiate prescriptions. Hence the shocking reality that “opioid overdoses have increased as opioid prescriptions have decreased.” Well, yeah. A bunch of addicts have turned from Oxycodone to heroin.

I don't think your points are mutually exclusive. In both cases, negligent government policy is fueling the deaths.

They are killing chronic pain sufferers and addicts alike, and addicts are sick humans too.

Absolutely. I just don’t like the disingenuous pro-legalization argument that pretends that “restricting the supply of opioid painkillers has only served to push those who need them into the black market” as if that’s anything close to the whole story.

You're looking at the symptom rather than the disease.

The despair is the disease. Drug and alcohol use are from people self-medicating their symptoms.

If anyone cared to address this problem, they'd look at what causes despair. That despair is often from economic and social distress.

Instead, everyone is outraged up on a media and politically driven moral panic about pharmaceutical medication that happens to be rarely abused and is almost never addictive (fewer than 0.1% chance of becoming addicted to prescribed painkillers, study on over 640,000 patients, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27400458).

No, drug and alcohol addiction definitely can produce despair. Causation can and does work both ways in this one, causing a spiral which is almost impossible to trace back to a single thing.

No, I don’t think economic problems per se cause despair. People are richer, much richer, than 100 or 1000 years ago. I don’t think that changes the fundamental human struggle with meaning, hope, purpose, and everything else that wards off despair.

I think that part of the problem may be that people are richer in ways that don't make them happy or give them meaning, and poorer in ways that do.

Most notably, it seems to me that owning your own house and land would bring a much greater sense of autonomy, accomplishment, control, etc. than more consumeristic things like TVs, video games, fancy food, etc. (not that its bad that those things exist).

I agree the problems should be fixed, but it's a serious enough problem that both the symptoms __and__ the underlying causes need to be addressed. Just working on one or the other isn't going to resolve the issue.

Just to let you know, the word you meant to use is “ravaging.” It’s almost an antonym to “ravishing.”

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