Sunday, September 3, 2017

Overdose Deaths Still Rising in Ohio

In Ohio, overdose deaths rose 33% from 2015-2016, a staggering amount. Most are from the synthetic opiate Fentanyl or its close analogs.

This is the sort of problem we ought to be working on solving, instead of shouting insults at each other.
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2 comments:

pootrsox said...

And very little of that fentanyl is actually prescription Fentanyl. Most of it is ilicit, manufactured outside the US, cut with even worse stuff, etc.

Meanwhile, people suffering from chronic pain are denied the opiate relief that would help them because doctors are under threat for prescribing it, since we have an "opiod epidemic." We do-- but not a prescription-written, supervised-use opiod epidemic.

September 3, 2017 at 2:57 PM
G. Verloren said...

Meanwhile, cigarette smoking kills 480,000 people annually in the US.

I couldn't easily find numbers on a state-by-state basis, but if we figure the number of deaths per state is proportional to the state's percentage of the total population of the country, then presumably cigarettes kill at least 17,000 Ohioans annually.

Strange, isn't it? When people kill themselves with one type of drug slowly over time, society accepts it as normal and unremarkable, nothing to be concerned about. But when 1/4 the number of people kill themselves with a different type over a shorter period of time, suddenly we view it as some kind of crisis that we need to figure out a solution to post haste.

It's like how many people are deathly afraid of flying, but don't give a second thought to getting into a car and speeding down the highway. Turns out we're really bad at being rational about danger, discounting the threat of familiar things while being overly sensitive to the unfamiliar.

September 4, 2017 at 6:23 AM

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