07.20.17
40 year slump bills — opioid statistics and desparation
At the New York Times, Thomas Edsall publishes a sobering statistic:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2014 that the number of opioid prescriptions outnumbered the number of people in 12 states. All 12 of these states voted for Donald Trump: Arkansas, Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia.
Also, the continuing study of the counties in the Rust Belt states that flipped voters from Obama to Trump:
The question that persists six months after Mr. Trump’s inauguration is why six key states — Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, along with 220 counties nationwide — flipped from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. Why did these voters change their minds? These are men and women who are, in the main, still working, still attending church, still members of functioning families, but who often live in communities where neighbors, relatives, friends and children have been caught up in disordered lives.
Schuylkill County, where I grew up in Pennsylvania, was one of these counties.
And heroin overdoses were then unknown there. Not anymore.
In June, Schuylkill County Coroner Dr. David J. Moylan III said the possibility of 60 drug-related deaths is something he thought would be a reality in the county.
[In 2015], 26 people died in drug-related deaths. Twelve of those involved heroin and three were fentanyl related.
County coroner data as of Friday show of those 54 [2016 deaths] so far, fentanyl was involved in 27 of them.
I’ve made the argument before that opioid drug death and the lack of answer for it indicate the country is headed for very profound disruption and failure.
The accumulating costs of throwing half the country to the dogs in the 40 year slump.
anon said,
July 21, 2017 at 6:06 pm
Wasn’t Schuylkill County the PA county with the highest rate of alcoholism in the state circa 25 years ago?
George Smith said,
July 22, 2017 at 11:32 am
Seems more recent than that…
Bottoms up.
Binge drinking is one category that puts Schuylkill County near the bottom in a health study of all Pennsylvania counties released last week.
Schuylkill County ranks 60th out of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties in overall health, with binge drinking, smoking and obesity rates all higher than the state average.
“I know we are not doing well,” Judy Schweich, executive director of Schuylkill Alliance for Health Care Access, said Friday. “It’s partly socio-economic, it’s partly alcoholism.”
http://republicanherald.com/news/study-schuylkill-county-near-bottom-in-overall-health-drinking-smoking-obesity-rates-higher-than-state-average-1.632213
Related:
Drug related overdose death in PA, 2015, from the DEA:
https://www.dea.gov/divisions/phi/2016/phi071216_attach.pdf
If there was any boom at any time, the results were never shared into the area. My entire point in the 40 year slump.