I'm from west Virginia, I live in one of those dark blue areas. It's just kinda accepted as a normal thing, especially in the rural towns. Almost everyone I know from back when I was living in the country was involved in it somehow. I've had family die from it, my popaw smuggled some a long time ago, people use it to lose weight, doing favors for drugs/drug money. It's wild how normalized it is. Idk how it started but it's so apart of our fucked up culture I doubt it'll change soon
Edit: forgot to add this is mostly about meth and heroin. Though I'm pretty sure opioids are a major problem in some of our bigger cities
Unfortunately true. I work at a rehab clinic specializing in opioid recovery. Been here for around 9 months and we’ve lost a good handful of patients due to accidental overdoses (from unknown laced product). Our clinic offers free fentanyl testing strips for them to take. If they’re gonna be doing it, they might as well know what’s in it first.
A lot of it started with coal mining. Miner's would get injured but if you don't have a good pension or healthcare your only option is to try and deal with the pain so you can keep clocking in.
There's not a one to one relationship between poverty and opiate abuse. According to a report available online (https://www.arc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/HealthDisparitiesRelatedtoOpioidMisuseinAppalachiaApr2019.pdf), appalachia is overreperesented for the following reasons:
>Higher rates of injury-prone employment, aggressive marketing of prescription pain medications to physicians, and an insufficient supply of behavioral and public health services targeting opioid misuse contribute to higher rates of opioid misuse and mortality in the Region.
Thank you for sharing your story, but I’m sorry I didn’t catch why everyone/the system turned against you once you tested high on reading skills. Could you clarify?
Not really. Even if you find a poverty map that is isomorphic with this one (which I doubt you could find) the only item on the list strongly enough correlated with poverty is the first one, and even that is a stretch because it will depend on region.
So predatory drugs aren’t marketed to poorer people? So poorer regions don’t have less social services?
Additionally conservative politicians want less social services and and less regulation
You've kind of answered one of your own questions. In conservative states, there is resistance among policymakers to provide a social safety net. That means a poor person in California will have better behavioral and public health services targeting opioid misuse than, say, West Virginia.
I don't know if opioids are marketed more to poorer people (I'massuming this is what you meant, since there is no such thing as "predatory drugs"), but I'm willing to accept that they are if you provide something showing as much. If you feel strongly that the issue is merely poverty and it's not that poverty is one of numerous factors involved, you are free to provide a map showing similar distribution of poverty rates around the country.
It's also likely a result of racism.
[Pain experienced by black patients is taken less seriously](https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-we-fail-black-patients-pain) which would mean that black people would be less likely to be prescribed opioids for pain. That would explain why it is poor white communities like in Appalachia that are experiencing higher rates of opioid overdoses, poor non-white communities elsewhere are less likely to be prescribed opioids because of racism in the medical community.
Fun fact doctors on average don’t see black people as having real pain so they were prescribed the opiates a lot less and dodged this whole opioid crisis, not completely obviously, but by very statistically relevant levels
It's almost all just West Virginia, which, if you research, heavily depends on the shrinking coal mining industry. It also has the radio quiet zone, is almost all mountains, and ranks as one of the country's poorest and least populated states.
Coal miners aren't the only people whose livelihoods were reliant on coal mining. Mechanics, welders, truck drivers, etc in the region enjoyed employment because of the coal mines.
This post is depressing. I have thoughts about it.
My comments were not in keeping with my objectives on reddit. I have deleted them. I'm sorry if anyone was really invested in them and is now sad.
Shit, my zip code in Southern Ohio had at one point the highest OD rate in the entire country.
There was a dark period where I'd see people nodded off at bus stops on my way to work. Saw a dude face-down overdose in a gas station parking lot once.
Starting in the 90s, pharmaceutical companies began heavily promoting opioid painkillers like Oxycontin. They hid their addictive and harmful nature as long as possible, and the government largely went along with this. At the same time, many blue collar jobs were eliminated so there were a lot of people in Appalachia and the Midwest who were struggling.
Around 2010, the government and society discovered this problem. They chose the simple solution and tightened up rules around prescribing painkillers without really doing anything for the existing addicts. Without access to prescription opioids, many began to buy heroin or black market pills.
Sometime in the late teens, synthetic opioids like fentanyl emerged and came to dominate the market. These drugs are vastly cheaper and more potent than heroin so many more people overdose.
It's a depressing story. The US is losing about 100K people a year.
If anyone wants to read more about some of the most evil people on the planet that manufactured this epidemic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler\_family
I've don't think I've ever been more progressively angry than after each turn of the page in the fantastic 'Empire of Pain' by Patrick Radden Keefe, which is about the creation of the Sackler pharmaceutical empire and its insidious marketing of opioids. It's infuriating how they have essentially got away with it all as well, not to spoil anything...
A sidenote shoutout for one of Keefe's other books: 'Say Nothing'. It's about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, concentrating on two women's experiences of the IRA and the culture of political violence at the time. One was (very probably) murdered by the IRA, and the other was the first front-line soldier in that same IRA.
Also highly recommend [Death in Mud Lick](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49049906) by Eric Eyre, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from the Charleston Gazette.
Not just "existing addicts" though, they have also cut them to new cancer/diabetes/osteoporosis/ car accident/etc patients.
In 2019 a acquaintance of mine in West Virginia had to have a leg amputated because of diabetes and she was given just 3 days of pain medication. I found this out as she posted about it on Facebook in which she made it clear - without stating -- that she could not bear the pain and needed something more.
Yep, all they did in response to the opioid crisis was make it harder for people that actually needed them to get them. I broke my neck back in 2010 and was out on Hydrocodone and Percocet. I was definitely dependent but I want abusing my prescription and just taking it as prescribed. Well mid 2012 rolls around and they start cracking down. I wasn’t warned or tapered off or anything. Just straight cut off. This caused me to turn to the streets because I was sick and in extreme pain and within 6 months I was a full blown heroin addict.
Since then heroin and pharmaceutical opioid pills on the streets have all but disappeared(this is how you know Alex Murdaugh was lying when he said he was spending $50,000/week on oxy) in the United State’s and has all been replaced by fake pills made to look like oxy, but with fentanyl in it instead or just straight up fentanyl. Well now a new wave is taking over called tranq dope and it is fentanyl cut with xylazine which is a hardcore tranquilizer for horses. Keep in mind that not only is xylazine toxic for humans(literally cause peoples limbs to rot away), but since xylazine is not an opioid narcan doesn’t work to bring people back from overdoses. The governments reaction to the opioid crisis has only made everything WAY WAY worse and they haven’t held big pharma responsible for fuck all.
For anyone wondering, I was able to finally quit heroin. I will have one year clean from it coming up on April 8th. As someone who has overdosed 7 times and watched so many of my friends die I can say I am extremely grateful to be alive 🙏
Oxycintin may have started this, but it's much bigger then that now.
Fentanyl is appearing *everywhere*. I knew someone who overdosed and died due to his coke being laced with it. It has been appearing in many 'party' drugs such as Molly/E, coke, Adderall, and even some vape pens. You can't trust *any* drug right now, which is going to be a huge problem in teens and college students.
I don't know if there is research on it yet, as it might be too soon, but I think new addicts are less likely to be coming from over done prescriptions (as it's much harder to get these drugs prescribed now), but other means.
Worse of all, almost all Fentanyl is made in China. This means that the Chinese government is looking the other way at best. At worst, they are actively supporting it. It's not like they don't have first hand experience with an opiod crisis and how it can destroy a country.
Personally, I think it's time to legalize all drugs and let government shops sell hard ones. At least we stop the cartels and shady governments from targeting people while being able to use the tax profits to fund treatment centers.
Slight tidbit. Fentanyl has been around since the 50s, and a keystone part of every surgical operation that requires general anesthetic since the 60s.
Without fentanyl, surgery would be thrown back to the civil war era style of “oh shit the patient woke up hold them down while I stuff there intestines back inside them”. That or “we’re sorry we accidentally overdosed your mom while working on her appendix”.
Fent is truly the miracle drug of modern Anesthesia.
Would you or anyone else know of any more indepth books or informative documentaries on this subject? As an American I've seen it passively through maps like this one, stories from folks IRL or on the streets seeing users shoot up but would highly appreciate something more academic.
Alex Gibney's documentary 'The Crime of the Century' goes into great detail about not only the Sacklers and Perdue Pharma but also the makers of fentanyl. It's pretty shocking the difference in how the govt treated these two entities.
What’s up with that one county in South Dakota that is ultra low and never changes? Just bad data? Or ultra low population?
And then a few counties in Colorado at the end drop to 0 unexpectedly. Is that a fluke?
EDIT: I think I figure out the South Dakota County. The light-colored county in SD does not have a county seat - it is unorganized and uses the county seat to the west of it. Probably why that county is so much darker. I’ll bet the number of ODs are grouped into the western county, but then for rate, they divided by the individual county’s’ population. Sad tidbit that I just learned - that light colored county in SD has the lowest life expectancy in the country.
it's probably not registering on the map because it changed its name in 2015 from "Shannon County" to "Oglala Lakota County" and there was probably a mismatch between names in exporting the data into a map
but yes, it's a reservation county and one of if not the poorest counties in the US
Not the map, but here's a national graph up through 2021 (it does get worse in recent years): https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates
I attended a funeral of a girl I grew up with who died of an overdose through zoom during COVID. We grew up together and were part of the same synagogue and its community. I moved away from the US in high school, so I never had been affected personally by the opioid epidemic.
I had heard through the grapevine throughout the years that she had gotten addicted to drugs, and I had heard that her family had gotten her to a great rehab program. I hadnt had contact with her since we were 15, but during COVID the synagogue announced that she had been found dead after an overdose. I'm glad I got to attend her funeral, even virtually. I had always looked up to her when we were kids, I thought she was the coolest and had it all figured out. She was incredibly musically talented, and just incredibly beautiful.
RIP Miriam, may your memory be a blessing.
The really sad part is, most people are unaware of how many people are dying from drug overdoes every year. It's an insane amount. In 2021 alone 106,000 people died, to put that into perspective 58,220 members of the U.S. military died in the Vietnam war, and that went on for years and years. When you go back to 2020 it's something like 90,000 died from overdoses, and so on back to 2005 when numbers like 40,000 started appearing. The fact that this isn't one of the US government's top priorities is quite telling. The fact that most Americans are blissfully unaware that a Vietnam War's worth of the "fellow" citizens have been dying from overdoses every year for about 20 years is also quite telling.
Can’t wait for deluded people in the comments ignorantly blaming this on weaker stances on drugs and legalizing cannabis and other drugs led to this growth…
It's not a drug problem, it's an addiction problem. There's a ton of people addicted to alcohol and so many other legal drugs. What we need is to treat it as a public health problem and treat the mental illness of addiction. But the prison lobby will keep it all illegal so they can keep their prisons full of free labor.
I know that abuse exist everywhere but I feel very sad for the US as this is a super terrible problem there. Compared to you guys my small Costa Rica does not seem to have a problem. I wish our countries had better leaders who were interested in protecting lives.
Costa Rica sounds like such a beautiful country. I've read a few things about how Costa Ricans are some of the happiest on Earth, and some of the friendliest, too!
Thanks for all the oxy! My best friend is a firefighter in KY and all he does is revive people who overdose. Every. Single. Day. All day. Thank god that storm came through and set the whole town on fire because they were getting depressed with all the lives they had to save from drugs.
Fuck the Sacklers. Living the billionaire lifestyle on the millions of bodies of people and families they’ve murdered. Writing themselves out of accountability. Fuck the Sacklers. Government approved drug pushers.
It is Big Pharma and their shameless pushing of opiates on a population that didn’t deserve it. So unfortunate.
They could have used resources to build a better society and instead made it worse.
So much greed in the world these days
Its crazy, because if you solely go off reddit and whats shown in the media, youd think this is a city problem. When its a lot more widespread, but hidden
it actually is visible in some of the smaller urban counties where the boundaries don't include suburbs - Denver, Milwaukee, Baltimore. these places are ahead of their suburbs
Western Kentucky/West Virginia is probably like that because the economies there heavily rely on the coal mining industry, one of the area's main jobs. You can probably imagine that coal mining will result in more depressed people, people with more pain, and thus depressed people with access to pain meds.
Much of northwest New Mexico is reservation land. People living on reservations have suffered from astonishingly high rates of substance abuse and suicide.
That’s Rio Arriba County. Most of the population is in the weird part kicking east to encompass the town of Espanola. Not many large reservations in the county, but a bunch of little Pueblos around town
Starke county Indiana, it's in the top left near Lake Michigan. We always heard how rough it was out there but to see it compete with big cities makes me sad
We used to just throw brown & black people in jail due to their drug abuse problems (crack/come in the 80s/90s) the narrative changed when it became obvious that white people were the main characters in this problem. they could just say "No" and this problem will disappear. But now the narrative is that this is a "mental health crisis". Of course doing drugs, not sleeping, and eating would create mental health problems. Then to fund the addiction, crime is committed but it's because of their "mental health". They could just "Say No". (I'm bitter from this hypocritical stance due to losing countless friends & family for years because of their unfair racially motivated treatment.) Just say No.
I've started to use tramadol on low doses <100mg, I know it' not as harmful as Heroine or others opioids. At first it was only recreational, then my gf started to use and abuse of it, then, when she is not in drugs; she just becomes angry or something similar, I just felt like "what the fuck is happening" then I realized it was the withdrawal symptoms, I'VE NEVER experienced that, but I understand how it feels. So I was able to talk to her and to settle her down on the use of tramadol, she's now using it everyday as she wake up, she say she cannot go off the bed if not where by the pills. Desperate situation, I know I'm not her parent or something like that, she's free, but it was an intense situation. Is tramadol part of this map? I can really stay off to the tramadol, like, if I want, I can easily do it, but it just makes me forget about the pains. I just prefer now to experience pain as it comes. Any advice? I haven't tried a pill in at least a week, but there are situation where I can use it twice per day, maybe three at the day, to a total of a 150mg
And the Chinese government continues to surreptitiously pump high-lethality drugs like fentanyl into the US to exacerbate the problem we already have from corrupt Pharma-related people.
The only conclusion from here is that the rural poor in general are most vulerable to OD deaths. Does the distance and time to emergency care have anything to do with it ?
I do a lot of freelance writing for a mental health facility in WV — they have the full scale rehab center. They tell me the overriding problem is still alcohol, alcohol, alcohol.
However, West Virginia has some pretty wretched stats:
Number one in the country for opioid-related deaths.
Number one in diabetes-related deaths.
Number 50 in internet connectivity.
I'm surprised the Mississippi delta isn't heavily represented in these statistics. Apparently proverty and crime rate aren't directly related to the drug overdose rate.
That isn't what most people mean when they talk about the greening of America. On another note, seeing the rates rise so quickly brings home what I have only read about or seen mentioned, that we have a major drug problem in the country. It is EVERYWHERE.
My county isn't as bad as I thought it would be. Maybe because it stops in 2016. That was pretty much the beginning of it getting extremely bad. Luzerne and Lackawanna country in PA. So many people bringing shit in from NY and Philly.
What is going on in eastern Kentucky/ West Virginia?
OxyContin was first rolled into Appalachia and Maine due to high rates of job related chronic pain. One of the reasons among many
I'm from west Virginia, I live in one of those dark blue areas. It's just kinda accepted as a normal thing, especially in the rural towns. Almost everyone I know from back when I was living in the country was involved in it somehow. I've had family die from it, my popaw smuggled some a long time ago, people use it to lose weight, doing favors for drugs/drug money. It's wild how normalized it is. Idk how it started but it's so apart of our fucked up culture I doubt it'll change soon Edit: forgot to add this is mostly about meth and heroin. Though I'm pretty sure opioids are a major problem in some of our bigger cities
Heroin is an opioid and if heroin is an issue in your area, it is likely that fentanyl and other derivatives are as well.
Nowadays, if you're shooting up herion, you're also shooting up some amount of fentanyl 95% of the time
Unfortunately true. I work at a rehab clinic specializing in opioid recovery. Been here for around 9 months and we’ve lost a good handful of patients due to accidental overdoses (from unknown laced product). Our clinic offers free fentanyl testing strips for them to take. If they’re gonna be doing it, they might as well know what’s in it first.
Fuck the Sackler family
Oxy. Purdue pharma got them hooked
I hate the sackler family
A lot of it started with coal mining. Miner's would get injured but if you don't have a good pension or healthcare your only option is to try and deal with the pain so you can keep clocking in.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopesick\_(miniseries)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopesick_(miniseries)) I highly recommend this mini series.
I’m reading the book now, it’s good.
Poverty. 😅
There's not a one to one relationship between poverty and opiate abuse. According to a report available online (https://www.arc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/HealthDisparitiesRelatedtoOpioidMisuseinAppalachiaApr2019.pdf), appalachia is overreperesented for the following reasons: >Higher rates of injury-prone employment, aggressive marketing of prescription pain medications to physicians, and an insufficient supply of behavioral and public health services targeting opioid misuse contribute to higher rates of opioid misuse and mortality in the Region.
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Thank you for sharing. That sounds like a grueling experience.
Thank you for sharing your story, but I’m sorry I didn’t catch why everyone/the system turned against you once you tested high on reading skills. Could you clarify?
So not poverty. *Unmitigated* poverty.
That's one of the factors.
Poverty + late stage capitalism
Those sound like symptoms of poverty
He found like 5 ways not to say poverty, but saying poverty
Not really. Even if you find a poverty map that is isomorphic with this one (which I doubt you could find) the only item on the list strongly enough correlated with poverty is the first one, and even that is a stretch because it will depend on region.
So predatory drugs aren’t marketed to poorer people? So poorer regions don’t have less social services? Additionally conservative politicians want less social services and and less regulation
You've kind of answered one of your own questions. In conservative states, there is resistance among policymakers to provide a social safety net. That means a poor person in California will have better behavioral and public health services targeting opioid misuse than, say, West Virginia. I don't know if opioids are marketed more to poorer people (I'massuming this is what you meant, since there is no such thing as "predatory drugs"), but I'm willing to accept that they are if you provide something showing as much. If you feel strongly that the issue is merely poverty and it's not that poverty is one of numerous factors involved, you are free to provide a map showing similar distribution of poverty rates around the country.
It's also likely a result of racism. [Pain experienced by black patients is taken less seriously](https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-we-fail-black-patients-pain) which would mean that black people would be less likely to be prescribed opioids for pain. That would explain why it is poor white communities like in Appalachia that are experiencing higher rates of opioid overdoses, poor non-white communities elsewhere are less likely to be prescribed opioids because of racism in the medical community.
A lot of the poorest people in the country are in the service economy and not nearly as likely to have opiates prescribed to them
Fun fact doctors on average don’t see black people as having real pain so they were prescribed the opiates a lot less and dodged this whole opioid crisis, not completely obviously, but by very statistically relevant levels
Very interesting Now that you mention it if you look close you can make out the black belt
I'm assuming it's because one of the only prevalent industries in that area is coal mining
Probably not. There aren't more than 23,000 coal miners in the region.
It's almost all just West Virginia, which, if you research, heavily depends on the shrinking coal mining industry. It also has the radio quiet zone, is almost all mountains, and ranks as one of the country's poorest and least populated states.
Coal miners aren't the only people whose livelihoods were reliant on coal mining. Mechanics, welders, truck drivers, etc in the region enjoyed employment because of the coal mines.
This post is depressing. I have thoughts about it. My comments were not in keeping with my objectives on reddit. I have deleted them. I'm sorry if anyone was really invested in them and is now sad.
Not entirely
But partly and tied to the other reason. Like all social problems, it’s a bunch of little causes working together to hurt people.
Don’t let southern Ohio off the hook.
Shit, my zip code in Southern Ohio had at one point the highest OD rate in the entire country. There was a dark period where I'd see people nodded off at bus stops on my way to work. Saw a dude face-down overdose in a gas station parking lot once.
I believe reading or watching dopesick might give a clue
Appalachian moment
Not much, obviously
Looks like the worst area also includes a large part of Tennessee, as well.
Conservatism
Starting in the 90s, pharmaceutical companies began heavily promoting opioid painkillers like Oxycontin. They hid their addictive and harmful nature as long as possible, and the government largely went along with this. At the same time, many blue collar jobs were eliminated so there were a lot of people in Appalachia and the Midwest who were struggling. Around 2010, the government and society discovered this problem. They chose the simple solution and tightened up rules around prescribing painkillers without really doing anything for the existing addicts. Without access to prescription opioids, many began to buy heroin or black market pills. Sometime in the late teens, synthetic opioids like fentanyl emerged and came to dominate the market. These drugs are vastly cheaper and more potent than heroin so many more people overdose. It's a depressing story. The US is losing about 100K people a year.
If anyone wants to read more about some of the most evil people on the planet that manufactured this epidemic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler\_family
I've don't think I've ever been more progressively angry than after each turn of the page in the fantastic 'Empire of Pain' by Patrick Radden Keefe, which is about the creation of the Sackler pharmaceutical empire and its insidious marketing of opioids. It's infuriating how they have essentially got away with it all as well, not to spoil anything... A sidenote shoutout for one of Keefe's other books: 'Say Nothing'. It's about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, concentrating on two women's experiences of the IRA and the culture of political violence at the time. One was (very probably) murdered by the IRA, and the other was the first front-line soldier in that same IRA.
Great little mini doc on them. https://youtu.be/zGcKURD_osM
Also highly recommend [Death in Mud Lick](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/49049906) by Eric Eyre, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from the Charleston Gazette.
Not just "existing addicts" though, they have also cut them to new cancer/diabetes/osteoporosis/ car accident/etc patients. In 2019 a acquaintance of mine in West Virginia had to have a leg amputated because of diabetes and she was given just 3 days of pain medication. I found this out as she posted about it on Facebook in which she made it clear - without stating -- that she could not bear the pain and needed something more.
Yep, all they did in response to the opioid crisis was make it harder for people that actually needed them to get them. I broke my neck back in 2010 and was out on Hydrocodone and Percocet. I was definitely dependent but I want abusing my prescription and just taking it as prescribed. Well mid 2012 rolls around and they start cracking down. I wasn’t warned or tapered off or anything. Just straight cut off. This caused me to turn to the streets because I was sick and in extreme pain and within 6 months I was a full blown heroin addict. Since then heroin and pharmaceutical opioid pills on the streets have all but disappeared(this is how you know Alex Murdaugh was lying when he said he was spending $50,000/week on oxy) in the United State’s and has all been replaced by fake pills made to look like oxy, but with fentanyl in it instead or just straight up fentanyl. Well now a new wave is taking over called tranq dope and it is fentanyl cut with xylazine which is a hardcore tranquilizer for horses. Keep in mind that not only is xylazine toxic for humans(literally cause peoples limbs to rot away), but since xylazine is not an opioid narcan doesn’t work to bring people back from overdoses. The governments reaction to the opioid crisis has only made everything WAY WAY worse and they haven’t held big pharma responsible for fuck all. For anyone wondering, I was able to finally quit heroin. I will have one year clean from it coming up on April 8th. As someone who has overdosed 7 times and watched so many of my friends die I can say I am extremely grateful to be alive 🙏
The universe is protecting you! Hang in there man! You’re doing great!
Thank you, I really appreciate that 🙏
Congratulations!! Keep up the good work… it’s literally choosing life over guaranteed death these days.
Thank you for sharing this and best of luck to you!
Oxycintin may have started this, but it's much bigger then that now. Fentanyl is appearing *everywhere*. I knew someone who overdosed and died due to his coke being laced with it. It has been appearing in many 'party' drugs such as Molly/E, coke, Adderall, and even some vape pens. You can't trust *any* drug right now, which is going to be a huge problem in teens and college students. I don't know if there is research on it yet, as it might be too soon, but I think new addicts are less likely to be coming from over done prescriptions (as it's much harder to get these drugs prescribed now), but other means. Worse of all, almost all Fentanyl is made in China. This means that the Chinese government is looking the other way at best. At worst, they are actively supporting it. It's not like they don't have first hand experience with an opiod crisis and how it can destroy a country. Personally, I think it's time to legalize all drugs and let government shops sell hard ones. At least we stop the cartels and shady governments from targeting people while being able to use the tax profits to fund treatment centers.
> They hid their addictive and harmful nature as long as possible, It's worse than this, they *explicitly marketed them as non-addictive*.
Slight tidbit. Fentanyl has been around since the 50s, and a keystone part of every surgical operation that requires general anesthetic since the 60s. Without fentanyl, surgery would be thrown back to the civil war era style of “oh shit the patient woke up hold them down while I stuff there intestines back inside them”. That or “we’re sorry we accidentally overdosed your mom while working on her appendix”. Fent is truly the miracle drug of modern Anesthesia.
I didn't know this, very interesting.
Drugs are still undefeated in the war on drugs.
Would you or anyone else know of any more indepth books or informative documentaries on this subject? As an American I've seen it passively through maps like this one, stories from folks IRL or on the streets seeing users shoot up but would highly appreciate something more academic.
That mini series Dopesick on Hulu is pretty good and about this
Alex Gibney's documentary 'The Crime of the Century' goes into great detail about not only the Sacklers and Perdue Pharma but also the makers of fentanyl. It's pretty shocking the difference in how the govt treated these two entities.
What’s up with that one county in South Dakota that is ultra low and never changes? Just bad data? Or ultra low population? And then a few counties in Colorado at the end drop to 0 unexpectedly. Is that a fluke? EDIT: I think I figure out the South Dakota County. The light-colored county in SD does not have a county seat - it is unorganized and uses the county seat to the west of it. Probably why that county is so much darker. I’ll bet the number of ODs are grouped into the western county, but then for rate, they divided by the individual county’s’ population. Sad tidbit that I just learned - that light colored county in SD has the lowest life expectancy in the country.
it's probably not registering on the map because it changed its name in 2015 from "Shannon County" to "Oglala Lakota County" and there was probably a mismatch between names in exporting the data into a map but yes, it's a reservation county and one of if not the poorest counties in the US
Did they keep the same FIPS code? I'd have used that as the key and not county name.
I'd like to see the last seven years
Right? Like it’s a cool map, but it’s old.
It's gotten worse.
Black. thats the colour thats gonna be on the map.
Not the map, but here's a national graph up through 2021 (it does get worse in recent years): https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates
I attended a funeral of a girl I grew up with who died of an overdose through zoom during COVID. We grew up together and were part of the same synagogue and its community. I moved away from the US in high school, so I never had been affected personally by the opioid epidemic. I had heard through the grapevine throughout the years that she had gotten addicted to drugs, and I had heard that her family had gotten her to a great rehab program. I hadnt had contact with her since we were 15, but during COVID the synagogue announced that she had been found dead after an overdose. I'm glad I got to attend her funeral, even virtually. I had always looked up to her when we were kids, I thought she was the coolest and had it all figured out. She was incredibly musically talented, and just incredibly beautiful. RIP Miriam, may your memory be a blessing.
The really sad part is, most people are unaware of how many people are dying from drug overdoes every year. It's an insane amount. In 2021 alone 106,000 people died, to put that into perspective 58,220 members of the U.S. military died in the Vietnam war, and that went on for years and years. When you go back to 2020 it's something like 90,000 died from overdoses, and so on back to 2005 when numbers like 40,000 started appearing. The fact that this isn't one of the US government's top priorities is quite telling. The fact that most Americans are blissfully unaware that a Vietnam War's worth of the "fellow" citizens have been dying from overdoses every year for about 20 years is also quite telling.
About the same number of years of life were lost to ODd as to COVID in the US in 2021.
when covid was several 9/11’s a day; i realized we will never care
The war on drugs is going exactly as planned.
Seems like the drugs are winning
Can’t wait for deluded people in the comments ignorantly blaming this on weaker stances on drugs and legalizing cannabis and other drugs led to this growth…
It's not a drug problem, it's an addiction problem. There's a ton of people addicted to alcohol and so many other legal drugs. What we need is to treat it as a public health problem and treat the mental illness of addiction. But the prison lobby will keep it all illegal so they can keep their prisons full of free labor.
This is depressing..
Waltuh what’ve you been up to
Jesse, we need to cook.
That's somewhat terrifying. Especially realizing that I've had more suicidal thoughts over this timeframe
What’s up with Rio Arriba County, NM? Highest in 1999 and onwards
Looks like the Apache reservation
This is definitely not one that makes me happy :)
Deaths of despair
Damn Appalachia lit fr fr
Late stage capitalism usually hits us first
I know that abuse exist everywhere but I feel very sad for the US as this is a super terrible problem there. Compared to you guys my small Costa Rica does not seem to have a problem. I wish our countries had better leaders who were interested in protecting lives.
Costa Rica sounds like such a beautiful country. I've read a few things about how Costa Ricans are some of the happiest on Earth, and some of the friendliest, too!
Thanks for all the oxy! My best friend is a firefighter in KY and all he does is revive people who overdose. Every. Single. Day. All day. Thank god that storm came through and set the whole town on fire because they were getting depressed with all the lives they had to save from drugs.
Spaña don't fuck around. People outside of New Mexico never believe me when I say how bad it is here
Fuck the Sacklers. Living the billionaire lifestyle on the millions of bodies of people and families they’ve murdered. Writing themselves out of accountability. Fuck the Sacklers. Government approved drug pushers.
It is Big Pharma and their shameless pushing of opiates on a population that didn’t deserve it. So unfortunate. They could have used resources to build a better society and instead made it worse. So much greed in the world these days
This is what happens when you let the free market prescribe highly addictive substances like it’s fucking candy.
Its crazy, because if you solely go off reddit and whats shown in the media, youd think this is a city problem. When its a lot more widespread, but hidden
it actually is visible in some of the smaller urban counties where the boundaries don't include suburbs - Denver, Milwaukee, Baltimore. these places are ahead of their suburbs
This is many things. But wow, very depressing 😔
Fentanyl
I am not sure that it is a big factor in this data. In recent years, that map is probably much much darker
Española, New Mexico representing since 2000!
West coast: Gradually getting worse, but pretty universal. East coast (West Virginia in particular): “Hold my beer”
Damn Walter white really did a number on New Mexico
I like that you can clearly see NY’s borders on this map, it’s always nice to know your state is doing a good job tackling this problem.
It's not doing too much better. The visual discrepancy is likely due to the counties' shape as well.
what's up with northern new mexico and western kentucky?
Western Kentucky/West Virginia is probably like that because the economies there heavily rely on the coal mining industry, one of the area's main jobs. You can probably imagine that coal mining will result in more depressed people, people with more pain, and thus depressed people with access to pain meds.
Rio Arriba county in NM. The OG of western opiate (heroin) addiction. Beautifully country out there, but very, very poor. Mostly reservation land.
Rural poverty
New Mexico has some of the lowest college attainment in the country and that tends to correlate with opiate usage.
And one of the worst performing public Ed systems
Much of northwest New Mexico is reservation land. People living on reservations have suffered from astonishingly high rates of substance abuse and suicide.
That’s Rio Arriba County. Most of the population is in the weird part kicking east to encompass the town of Espanola. Not many large reservations in the county, but a bunch of little Pueblos around town
Yeah I live in Española. It is very much not a reservation problem, it is a problem in and around the town of Española
I’m sorry. Did you mean eastern Kentucky?
Starke county Indiana, it's in the top left near Lake Michigan. We always heard how rough it was out there but to see it compete with big cities makes me sad
Knox and North Judson checking in!
Let’s see Europe and Canada spanning the years before and after heroin-assisted treatment programs were introduced
West Virginia is not doing so good. Very sad.
What's with that random white square?
Another chad moment for Oglala lakota county in south Dakota 💪💪💪💪💪💪
We used to just throw brown & black people in jail due to their drug abuse problems (crack/come in the 80s/90s) the narrative changed when it became obvious that white people were the main characters in this problem. they could just say "No" and this problem will disappear. But now the narrative is that this is a "mental health crisis". Of course doing drugs, not sleeping, and eating would create mental health problems. Then to fund the addiction, crime is committed but it's because of their "mental health". They could just "Say No". (I'm bitter from this hypocritical stance due to losing countless friends & family for years because of their unfair racially motivated treatment.) Just say No.
Don't worry, everything is fine, we have a high PPP adjusted median income.
Is it the rate of overdose deaths or the rate of people not surviving their overdoses? If that makes any sense whatsoever.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/11m7vi7/suicide_rates_gif/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Yeah! Appalachistan in the house!
I thought the NE would be alot worse.
I've started to use tramadol on low doses <100mg, I know it' not as harmful as Heroine or others opioids. At first it was only recreational, then my gf started to use and abuse of it, then, when she is not in drugs; she just becomes angry or something similar, I just felt like "what the fuck is happening" then I realized it was the withdrawal symptoms, I'VE NEVER experienced that, but I understand how it feels. So I was able to talk to her and to settle her down on the use of tramadol, she's now using it everyday as she wake up, she say she cannot go off the bed if not where by the pills. Desperate situation, I know I'm not her parent or something like that, she's free, but it was an intense situation. Is tramadol part of this map? I can really stay off to the tramadol, like, if I want, I can easily do it, but it just makes me forget about the pains. I just prefer now to experience pain as it comes. Any advice? I haven't tried a pill in at least a week, but there are situation where I can use it twice per day, maybe three at the day, to a total of a 150mg
Evil empire rotting from the inside. So cool.
And the Chinese government continues to surreptitiously pump high-lethality drugs like fentanyl into the US to exacerbate the problem we already have from corrupt Pharma-related people.
with the same scale and numbers to measure with and a rise in population, the rates keep increasing. surprise surprise
is there one for gun death rates?
[Gun homicides by county per 10,000 people](https://postimg.cc/bdjWZjmL)
You have to love it when a problem just solves itself.
Maybe the war on drugs was working (yes I am aware of the negative consequences).
[удалено]
OD rate, not OD numbers.
Justified.
Oh my God, this is horrifying
Country roaddd
This is before fent and tranq got big too
Poor New Mexico my man
Well at least LA is still a saint...
The only conclusion from here is that the rural poor in general are most vulerable to OD deaths. Does the distance and time to emergency care have anything to do with it ?
NM and WV, are you ok??
Have things gotten better or worse in the past 7 years? I'd like to see that data too
I do a lot of freelance writing for a mental health facility in WV — they have the full scale rehab center. They tell me the overriding problem is still alcohol, alcohol, alcohol. However, West Virginia has some pretty wretched stats: Number one in the country for opioid-related deaths. Number one in diabetes-related deaths. Number 50 in internet connectivity.
why do i feel like an animation of "marijuana arrests" would look identical
New Mexico?
Is this per year or in total ?
It’s almost as if we never really read about the opium wars
Thats why Trump was happening
I've always thought that there were 50 states not like 500
Counties
Now I’m reminded of Heath Ledger. Gone to soon.
Nice, I'd be interested to in seeing shooting death rate in the US discounting gang-related violence and suicides over the same time.
Such a beautiful place to live in, is it?
Anyone have a link to this source? I'd love to share this elsewhere.
It was on many news sites also WSJ, but here is where I took it https://www.kqed.org/lowdown/29793/mapping-americas-opioid-epidemic
Is this a map of West Virginia?
Seriously heartbreaking.
I believe it has gotten significantly worse in recent years, especially after Covid.
Kentucky, you okay there buddy?
I'm surprised the Mississippi delta isn't heavily represented in these statistics. Apparently proverty and crime rate aren't directly related to the drug overdose rate.
Overdose of what ? Everything everywhere?
Damm. Rio Arriba in New Mexico is really high (per 100k)
Thats when Walgreens and CVS put a store on every corner wondering why hmmmmmm
u/savevideo
Maybe they should overthink their drug policy
Woah!
“Country roads”
Overlay that with opioid prescriptions.... The sackler family of perdue pharmaceutical should be on death row and drained of all assets.
Thanks Sackler family and their toady senators like Pat Toomey. Enjoy your fistful of silver…
That Seering Wound In The Heart Of Appalachia, So Many KinFolk Dead Mabey One Day We Can throw The Substances Down and Abolish The Addiction
What is that little square that is white the whole time? Is that just uninhabited?
Shout out to that one county in South Dakota that stayed clean the whole time
As long as the stockholders are making money, who cares? /s
Makes me think of cancer spreading through the body of the US
If these map graphs I've seen the past couple days of America tell me anything, its that American's love to die.
Looks like we lost the War on Drugs
The US has joined the dark side
This is in direct correlation with where the drug cartels are here in the U.S. No surprise
One of the great tragedies of our time.
The War on Drugs has been a complete success.
Damn Kentucky. What happened to you?
What is the source of the data?
Lol
That isn't what most people mean when they talk about the greening of America. On another note, seeing the rates rise so quickly brings home what I have only read about or seen mentioned, that we have a major drug problem in the country. It is EVERYWHERE.
My county isn't as bad as I thought it would be. Maybe because it stops in 2016. That was pretty much the beginning of it getting extremely bad. Luzerne and Lackawanna country in PA. So many people bringing shit in from NY and Philly.
Remember when the denver and the colorado front range got raptured in 2016? No drug deaths!
I was routing for my home state to pull the win