Drug overdose deaths in 2016 most likely exceeded 59,000, the largest annual jump ever recorded in the United States.
The death count is the latest consequence of an escalating public health crisis: opioid addiction, now made more deadly by an influx of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and similar drugs. Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death among Americans under 50.
Although the data is preliminary, the Times’s best estimate is that deaths rose 19 percent over the 52,404 recorded in 2015. And all evidence suggests the problem has continued to worsen in 2017.
Drug Overdose
Estimate for drug overdose deaths in US in 2016: 59,000
Estimate for drug overdose deaths in US in 2017: more than 70,000 (if recent annual rate of growth continues unchecked)
Annual US Car Crashes
Peak deaths in US from car crashes (in 1972): 55,000
Estimate for car crash deaths in US in 2016: 40,000 (The highest figure in 9 years, due to texting while driving)
Annual US Gun Deaths
Peak deaths in US from guns (in 1993): 39,000
Estimate for gun deaths in US in 2016: 33,000 (Almost 2/3 are suicide, almost 1/3 are homicide, remainder classified as accidental)
Opioid Addiction
I've found the following charity that is focused on addressing this public policy crisis. I believe we have an obligation to take action on this public policy issue using private charities, as opposed to just waiting for government to take action.
Shatterproof. Stronger than Addiction
Shatterproof is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to ending the devastation that addiction causes families.
Proposal to the Steemit community on action we can take:
- I'll donate from my personal funds with a 3X match against whatever the final payout value is for this post
- This total will then get a further 1X match through an employer match I have access to
- Example A: If this post pays out at $100, I'll add $300 of my own funds to make the total $400. Total donation to Shatterproof will then be $800 after the 1:1 employer match.
- Example B: If this post pays out at $1,000, I'll add $3,000 of my own funds to make the total $4,000. Total donation to Shatterproof will then be $8,000 after the 1:1 employer match.
These donations will be possible due to charitable nature of the Steemit community, my personal 3X matching contribution, and the employer 1:1 match.
I'll make the donation to Shatterproof within one week of this post paying out on Steemit. I'll post copies of the receipts for the donation on Steemit.
If you think this is a worthwhile cause, you can take simple actions to help.
Please upvote at 100% and resteem.
Thank you in advance if you choose to participate.
STEEM On!!
Dave B
Source image from Washington Post, initial source text from NYTimes
One way we can combat this problem is getting all non-abuse-deterrent opioids banned. States are starting to do this in the USA and companies like EGALET are making amazing opioids that can not be abused.
Solutions are needed, the problem cannot keep growing unchecked.
Thanks for reading and commenting
STEEM On!!
DaveB
Informative stuff dude
This post received a 2.9% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @ehujra! For more information, click here!
Opiate addiction hit my family, the place to start is the pharmaceutical industry that markets their crap like candy. They need to be held accountable. They are nothing but drug dealers who evade prosecution.
Sorry to hear of the issues so close. I agree Big Pharma needs to be held to legal account
STEEM On!!
but still Janet Yellen blaming this for low employment is such a joke. let's face it.. how many real jobs with proper benefits have been created in the past few years.. lot of the so called non farm payroll is coming from waiters and waitresses that are often part time with no real benefits
Against my better judgment I upvoted a comment that included reference to Janet Yellen.
The same lady that promised we would never have another financial crisis in our life-time.
She is either an liar, or an idiot. Not sure which yet.
Thanks for support
STEEM On !!
Dave B
It is very sad. This has become a major problem.
Thanks for support
STEEM On !!
Dave B
So sad I don't know how dealers could help others be closer to death..
The real tradegy is in most cases the problems start with the US health care industry, where doctors write scripts for Oxycontin, Percocet, others. People get addicted. The prescription runs out. And they turn to illegal drugs to meet their addictive needs.
Collusion between Big Pharma and health care industry starts the cycle.
Lack of control at the border to stop illegal drugs flooding the country is the finishing touch.
Trump will pivot his messaging in the next couple of weeks, with Scarmucci. The wall isn't primarily to keep out the aliens. It is primarily to slow the tsunami of illegal drugs that are killing 70,000 Americans per year.
STEEM On!!
I have lost many people in my life due to overdose . Breaks my heart .. all we can do is spread awareness.
Steem on my friend !!
Thank you. DaveB
The problem is cultural. Did you know that in the Philippines up until recently you could not even get morphine if dying of cancer because the filipinos believe that pain is natural from God. That is a bit extreme I think, as I think terminal illness should be allowed pain relief.
But the greater point here is that it is the culture of the West which is the real fundamental source of the problem. For example the psychological problem of removing the responsibility of men and replacing it with socialism, divorce, and feminism.
I clarified my prior comments and made a new comment which hopefully explains that I do care but I am afraid we are not helping:
https://steemit.com/money/@anonymint/get-ready-for-a-world-currency#@davebrewer/re-anonymint-get-ready-for-a-world-currency-20170723t032052988z
60 years ago it was similar in North America. No morphine for those dying of cancer. You could die screaming in a straight jacket.
Since then culture has over corrected. Now pain is treated for its own sake, no matter how minor, with prescriptions.
Big Pharma pushing more drugs than are really medically needed.
But Big Pharma has higher paid lobbyists in Washington than medical marijuana industry, so the unnecessary pills keep flowing.
I'm hoping Trump succeeds in "draining the swamp".
But he has a huge uphill fight in front of him. There is a lot of money sloshing around in Washington and Trump is threatening to shut that all down.
He has a lot of people in Washington that want him to fail.
There are too many people in Washington that pay off both Democrats and Republicans, and buy there way into halls of power.
Kratom has been helping a lot of people get off of opiates. Unfortunately, the DEA is attempting to ban Kratom and delegitimize its benefits. Have you heard of Kratom or used it? It's a great, simple remedy. That'd be a good thing to promote on future posts about Opiates.
Thanks for support
STEEM On!!
DaveB
I have only anecdotal evidence from a good friend kratom is effective without terrible side effects (but I find it's pretty convincing)- but it usually is far MORE effective when combined with nutritional modifications, and gets very complicated for the very people who are less than capable of devoting the time, attention, and energy to self-treat their terrible medical problems. It's obviously NOT the one-pill magic bullet, but then opioids and most of the other powerful drugs the pharmas and ordinary doctors are pushing for for maximizing profit and convenience are definitely not either.
Yeah I was going to comment about kratom, definitely something for OP and others to consider for helping people get off and stay off opiate addictions.
Thanks to the pharmaceutical controlled government the only approved 'legimate' painkillers I can get for the aftereffects of a stroke I had 4 years ago are oxicontin or hydrocodone based while I'd rather have something more natural based on medical marijuana
Medical marijuana is going to be at least a part of the solution to this problem. Politicians that stand in the way of that outcome need to be run out of office. Fortunately for them tar and feathering has went out of style
STEEM On !!
DaveB
This need to be resteemed to reach more and more people i am doing my Bit !!
Thanks for support
STEEM On!!
DaveB
This guy is a whale!!!!!...
Paraphrasing Bentsen in the 1988 vice-presidential debates: "Sir, I know a lot of whales, and you are NO whale!!"
If you look up the "official" steemit definition I'm barely more than a minnow. Take a look at SP on steemwhales.com site (when it comes back from its 24 hour hiatus).
You can see what a whale looks like on steemwhales.com
Thanks for reading
STEEM ON!!
DaveB
what...arent you a whale yet?you have fucking so much power...youre like son goku already...
Whales have 1 Million or 2 Million SP to vote with. I just have 30K.
I'm 40 to 80 times smaller than your typical whale.
At the most, I'm a fat minnow.
STEEM On!!
DaveB
love youre post bro... really informative..
All those numbers are horrific. I wont even start on the fire arms fatalities...
But man, 40.000 killed in traffic accidents? In Germany, we have about 2.500 per year, in a 80 mio population. And people (the stupid ones) here also text, and we have no speed limit on highways.
To the opiate problem... I have a solution: reactivate Alcatraz, and lock up all leading people of the pharma industry there. Then put that industry under government control. It may also help in the exploding health care costs issue.
Wise move. So then I won’t start on all the rapes from rapefugees and how any sufficient power (e.g. Russia) could overrun all of Europe like a hot knife through warm butter because you have no right to arm yourselves (and even the sycophants are proposing to arm the invaders!). Btw, the deaths from firearms in the white middle class areas of the USA are on par with Finland. The crime is an intercity problem, which Merkel is importing into Europe.
P.S. enjoy the economic collapse of Europe starting in earnest next year.
Igoring the suicide class, you are correct that homicides are more than 80% black deaths. With 13% of population being black, but 80% of homicides being black deaths, the black population is suffering from gun violence at a rate more than 10X the white population.
The black population should be rioting to stop the senseless gun violence that is decimating their neighborhoods.
Instead they are rioting - Black Lives Matter - to make it hard or impossible for the police to provide protections for the black community. The target of Black Lives Matter (and many on the liberal left) are the police who are trying to help.
TOTALLY BASS ACKWARDS. But did you ever hear the MSM saying anything negative about Black Lives Matter?
STEEM On!!
DaveB
BlackAll Lives Matter.I am happy that you are awake on that aspect.
Again I am very much in favor of parents and family doing first and foremost prevention and then if that fails of course intervention.
What I am against is the clusterfuck of the SJW’s death trap.
I am not telling anyone what they must do. Nature will take care of that teaching process. I am just suggesting others should look behind the bullshit at what actually happens throughout human history when humans think they can violate for example the power-law distribution of resources in nature.
We have all the data we need from a few thousands of years of human civilization. That is why I read for example Martin Armstrong. And he is by no means a misogynist or rascist.
I value happiness and success. I want that for every human on earth. The details of how to actually possibly attain that are important. It can’t be obtained with SJW and Marxist nonsense.
The welfare state combined with the drugs is what created the ghettos. Before that you can see blacks working in service stations pumping gas. (not to say that any race is only fit to pump gas, my point is merely they were motivated to work and had stronger paternal families) Dig into Catherine Austin Fitts (former undersecretary of HUD and Wallstreet insider) and the Gary Webb story (he wrote exposés on the San Jose Mercury newspaper and was eventually murdered for it). Ties into CIA running drugs, the Iran-Contra and Oliver North issue way back and how the CIA helped create this problem via HUD to create the ghettos.
And you realize if I keep writing about that then I will not be living much longer.
Come on people wake up! We live in a very corrupt world and you can not change it from the top-down via revolution overthrowing the government. We change it with decentralized technology and correct economics for prosperity. Correct free markets not corrupt fascism that we have now (which is not really free markets per se).
The French Revolution replaced the nobility with a new set of nobility. Revolution changes nothing, and is financed by the elite you are trying to overthrow, because they know that revolution provides an opportunity to increase Marxism and totalitarianism.
P.S. I will say that some cops are abusive. And there is more to say about this, but I will not go off on that tangent right now.
If the revolution replaces one elite with a new elite, that was a lot of pain for little overall gain.
Which is often obfuscated as being some Utopian/benign/non-hierarchical Marxist commune, but it is always a power vacuum that sucks in a top-down control and privileged elite.
Unfortunately the youth are vulnerable to not understanding this. The following discuss this in detail. My X generation sandwiched between the boomers and the Millennials is too small politically to counter balance the Millennials.
Quora Q&A: Do millennials feel more entitled than previous generations?; and see also Dave Sloan’s answer.
The Rising Civil Unrest in America is Highly Dangerous for the Future
The Right to Vote Should Attach to Only Those Who Pay Taxes
British Election Backfires on May – Exit Polls Show Hung Parliament
Grenfell Protests – May Must Go
Jordan Peterson - Growing Up and Being Useful is The New Counterculture
Your link to "Right to Vote should be for those that Pay Taxes" was interesting.
I agree it is dangerous to have folks that don't pay taxes voting - they'll tend to vote for more free stuff and once they are more than 50% of the population, that is the end.
Next logical extension is the weight of your vote should be determined by how much taxes you do pay.
And at that point, fairly close to recreating the current upvote system with SP in Steemit.
meep
Multiply 2.5K per year by 4 to normalize for population. So we are at 10K. Multiply by another 1.6K to normalize for distance driven each year. Fatalities are more correctly compared apple to apple when normalized for distance driven. So we are at 16K. Add 11K which is the numbeof deaths due to DUI and we are at 27K. Close to the 33K number.
The difference between 27K and 33K may be the increased seriousness with which Germans provide licenses and treat driving as an earned privilege, rather that a right which many in the US view it as.
I normalized for DUI since the legal limit is 0.05 in Germany and DUI is viewed as a serious offense. The legal limit in the US is 0.08 and folks that cause DUI deaths are not shunned in the way they would be if they had pulled a gun trigger instead of driving drunk
STEEM On!!
Well, I dont have any data about the average distance driven per year/capita.
As to the DUI, those fatalities are included in the 2500 already. And driver who DUI usually dont care if its 0.05 or 0.08, they are way above that. Unfortunately, also here causing a death by DUI is not punished like a homicide.
Its possible that the driver training plays a role, or also the higher age limit (18) to get a licence. I dont know about US statistics, but here the under 25 year old (male in particular) are over represented in causing accidents and deaths, especially due to speeding.
Industries make many things that can be used for good or bad. Pharma is a for profit industry there is no doubt, but they are not in the business of killing their customers (note I am not involved in pharma). Apparently the distributors are dropping that ball. I support your effort to help. But like cancer, i wonder if this is a war we will win.
There is a lot of progress being made on various cancer treatments. Gene based therapies are showing promise. IF winning the war on cancer means stopping 100% from ever occurring that is hopeless. If the goal is finding new ways to treat, that can extend lives by 5 or 10 years, that could be considered a victory
STEEM On !!
DaveB
This is a cultural problem that can't be fixed with volunteerism.
America has to crash and burn. There is no way out as a whole.
Individually we can fork off from that morass and build prosperity. But if you are trying to fix all that baggage, you will just bankrupt yourselves and mire yourself in a clusterfucked morass.
I care about people, but there are some problems which have to fix themselves and can't be fixed by good intentions.
I hope you found on my blog the links to Catherine Austin Fitts and the Gary Webb connection. Dig into that rabbit hole if you want to see how deep the drug trade goes into the CIA, etc..
Thanks for reading and replying. There are problems in every generation. A system that can't self adjust is too fragile to be worth saving. I believe we should keep adjusting the US system and work on fixing the areas that need fixed. Crash and burn and starting over is no more a guaranteed solution, than trying to fix what is broken in current system is guaranteed to fail.
STEEM On !!
I do not prefer the crash and burn.
Please see the blockchain for the rest of this post which I decided to delete from the default view.
Upvoted and also resteemed!
OMGsh! That is so sad to here...Thanks for supporting such an amazing cause! Hope this post is a huge payout! Sorry my little minnow status can't give much, but every bit helps :) Good luck!
Thanks for helping
STEEM On!!
Dave
Yea!! Thank you! ❤
This has hit my city really hard and I have personally had a couple people I know fall to this crisis. I have resteemed and upvoted. Thanks for the good you are doing.
Sorry to hear this has hit so close. Thanks for all your support.
STEEM On!!
DaveB
Maybe, we should legalize all drugs like they did in Portugal. Seems to be working rather well for them.
Just because I am essentially a minanarchist Libertarian, does not mean I think we can inundate our communities with legal access to pot (which leads to other drug use amongst teens) and expect to not collapse as a society. Yet I do think the teaching and control needs to begin in the home/family, but the government/culture has invaded and destroyed paternal responsibility.
Do you not know how England bankrupted China by addicting them to opium. Asia is instituting death penalties for drugs while the West is encouraging the destruction of the society with them. History repeats as the cycle goes around.
It will not work out well. The crash and burn is accelerating for the West and Asia is rising to take the crown and render the West to Third World status. The zombie Flakka crack epidemic in the USA is reportedly mostly manufactured in China.
No harmful, recreational, non-medicinal drugs allowed in my household. Although I can not control what the offspring do outside the household. A father does not have that control anymore. This is one of the reasons men choose to not even attempt to be responsible fathers. What is the point? Facebook and groupthink peer influence owns your children.
IIRC, drugs were not illegal in the US until the 20th century and everything you think "might" happen didn't happen. I prefer to be free to make my own choices. There are many studies that say drug use does not increase with legalization. Have you even looked into what has happened in Portugal relating to this issue?
We don't have to take that big of a step as a first step. Legalizing medical marijuana in every state would provide substantial first step to minimizing need for opioids.
STEEM On !!
DaveB
I totally agree with you on this point. I would also suggest decriminalization for MJ as well. We all know too well how the "war on drugs" has worked for the past 40 years.
Drugs overdoese is alone taken the most number of lifes this is really painful.
Money worth more than Human life these days,, good job !
This incorrect attitude/ideology/conceptualization results in megadeath.
Throwing money to corruption (which is what collective action always does) just leads to economic collapse and that is when the megadeath begins.
There have been no exceptions in the history of humankind.
this need to be take care of life is precious !!
How would you take care of what is nature’s way of culling the herd?
When the Black Death struck Europe and killed 50% of the population, there was nothing anyone could do.
How are you going to feel when the West collapses and there is nothing you can do about it and many people perish? Will you learn to respect nature?
If we really cared about lives, we would start by not creating this clusterfucked culture we have now in the West.
If life is precious, then why did white women stop reproducing?
Thanks for support @blazing
STEEM On!!
DaveB
In my country drug overdose deaths is not very common, but lots of people take some drog! I hope it will decrase!
Max vote this for sure. Good work man. I hope this post makes 10k.
Thank you.
Personally I'm thinking $1K is a more probable max. I hope it gets that far.
Dave B
I want to help. Everyone, please send me your opiates and I will dispose of them.
I had heard goats would eat anything
the hell is youre steempower...29,000!
No. You seem to be misinformed.
Opioids abuse is definitely a problem in the United States. I do believe that a way to cut down on this is by making sure prescription opioids are not abused. There should be stringent checks run on how many opioids are prescribed by doctors.
Agreed, that simple change would be a big start. No more 30 day prescriptions for a dental operation where 2 days is more than enough.
Politicians in US are so incompetent that they can't even get that common sense change into legislation in less than five years.
Yes, I definitely agree. I have heard of many stories from pain management physicians about patients who come to them seeking large prescriptions of opioids. The ones I know don't prescribe if it seems a person is addicted to them or limit them to low amount of days. I do worry about it since there still other physicians who aren't as careful about it.
Apparently dispossessed middle-age men turn to opioids because society has removed their sense of worth.
Regulating opioids is not addressing the root problem and thus will not fix it. The dispossessed will turn to some $1 street drug like Flakka or who knows what to address the insanity they feel due to society being turned upside down by socialism.
Putting bandaids on skin cancer is futile. You must go to the root of the problem, which is cultural decadence.
This post received a 3.2% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @davebrewer! For more information, click here!
post nice....@fahrullah