U.S. life expectancy falls for second straight year — as drug overdoses soar

[Kriegsspiel]

I DON'T NEED LIFE, I'M HIGH ON DRUGS
- Evidently a fuck ton of people

[farjean2]

Thanks for the link, Dualstow. BTW what's the story behind the new avatar? It looks like a collector's item plate.

However, I am absolutely dumbfounded at the theory put forth by this video, that distributors are "pumping drugs" into people who don't need them and are therefore responsible for their deaths. They're talking as if opioids are something new. They're not. They've been around for thousands of years, have been commonly used in something like their present form for the past hundred or so years, and - here's the real kicker - they are all cheap, generic drugs that pharmaceuticals and distributors by definition don't make a lot of money on. For example, Vicodin is listed at $13 for 60 tablets on goodrx, and morphine 15mg tablets are $25 for 120. The real money is in brand name statins, diabetes meds, etc.

The other issue, of course, is that distributors (legal ones anyway) can't "pump drugs" into people. A prescription has to be written first. Some people then sell the drugs on the street - but that, too, has been going on for decades.

This has all the hallmarks of a manufactured crisis, and a way of deflecting attention from what is probably the real issue: the epidemic of depression and related psychiatric illness that causes people to self-medicate and commit suicide.

I think TDS is probably responsible for some of this too.

What's TDS?

I saw the 60 minutes segment and thought it was the kind of over-sensationalized one-sided story that is often typical of that show. It starts with a statistic of 200,000 deaths due to heroin overdoses and then gives the impression that this is entirely due to prescription drugs. I have no idea what the real statistics are but I'd be willing to bet this was a distortion of the facts.

The other side of this story is the number of people who can't get pain relieving drugs that they really need due to fear of criminal prosecution. I learned of this problem very well when my wife was sent home from the cancer institute to die at home but with prescriptions for Oxycontin and liquid morphine. Trying to find a pharmacy willing to fulfill those prescriptions was nearly impossible. I finally found one on the other side of town but they insisted that my wife had to be present at the counter to pick them up.

That was almost 20 years ago but I found out not much has changed when I went to a local clinic because I couldn't find anything over the counter to give me relief from the pain and itching of shingles. I hadn't been able to sleep for about 5 days at that time and was actually delirious. They gave me something for the itching but they were sorry, they couldn't prescribe anything for the pain even though they knew narcotics would help.

[WiseOne]

Those are very sad stories, farjean. I'm sorry you had to deal with that.

FWIW, I can cite examples of patients who died from status epilepticus, because they were on a medication that was placed by New York State in the same category as opioids, which made it hard for them get the prescription renewed & filled. The prescriptions have to be written anew once a month, in a multistep process that takes about 10 minutes per prescription. Prior to this bureaucratic nightmare, these medications were commonly used and very effective for some patients.

But hey, what do I know compared to 60 minutes...

[Tortoise]

My understanding is that a large fraction of recent opioid overdoses in the Western world have been due to a proliferation of illegally manufactured fentanyl on the black market in recent years. From the wikipedia article on fentanyl:

“Authorities suspect that the drug is being imported from Asia to the western coast by organized crime groups in powder form and being pressed into pseudo-OxyContin tablets.”

[WiseOne]

My understanding is that a large fraction of recent opioid overdoses in the Western world have been due to a proliferation of illegally manufactured fentanyl on the black market in recent years. From the wikipedia article on fentanyl:

“Authorities suspect that the drug is being imported from Asia to the western coast by organized crime groups in powder form and being pressed into pseudo-OxyContin tablets.”

That might be true, but that's a long way from blaming prescription drug manufacturers and prescribers.

I'm really confused about where this new hysteria came from. It's completely out of the blue, like the transgender bathroom [non]issue. I looked up the stats on drug overdose deaths on the drugabuse.gov website. There's a very misleading chart showing absolute numbers of deaths since the 1990s. Yes they've increased, but so has the population. The rate probably hasn't increased, at least not by much. And the absolute numbers are comparable to the number of annual motor vehicle deaths and also the number of suicides - which is increasing by far more than the drug overdose rate. Interestingly, you don't hear much about those. And the link between suicides and drug overdoses is kind of glaringly hard to ignore.

[dualstow]

BTW what's the story behind the new avatar?

It’s from an Australian show that vaguely reminds me of ‘Lost’ and was created by a sound wave of a certain frequency applied to sand or other granular substance

[WiseOne]

BTW what's the story behind the new avatar?

It’s from an Australian show that vaguely reminds me of ‘Lost’ and was created by a sound wave of a certain frequency applied to sand or other granular substance

Geek-dom at its best! I love it.

[dualstow]

Oh, not The Deep State?

[mathjak107]

life expectancy means lots of different things .life expectancy from birth means little many times . while the max age we live to has fallen since 2014 , more and more of us are living to older ages .

as kitces pointed out :

For instance, a child born in 2014 has a life expectancy (average age at death) of 79. However, the median age of death for the same child is 83, and the modal (most common) age at death is 89! Given the shape of the distribution of ages at death (negatively skewed), it’s simply a mathematical fact that the mean is going to be lower than the median or the mode.