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Tag: drug overdose
Is America's Pandemic Derangement A Permanent Condition?

Is America's Pandemic Derangement A Permanent Condition?

A few months ago, I ran into a recently-retired judge, a former prosecutor and friendly acquaintance, at the grocery store. I asked him what he thought was causing the wave of homicides and shooting incidents around the city. Even in our normally safe, quiet neighborhood, it’s not uncommon to hear fusillades of gunfire in the night—semi-automatic pistols by the sound of them.

“Damned if I know,” he said. “Probably the same thing that’s making everybody drive like lunatics.”

It’s true. In my travels around town, it’s not uncommon to be passed on a double yellow line on residential streets. Thirty seconds later, you pull up behind them gunning their engines at a stoplight. Everybody drives like they’re in Dallas, with lots of tailgating and horn-blowing. Granted, I’m an old duffer in no particular hurry, but people run so many red lights that it’s definitely a good idea to look both ways on green.

One-finger salutes are ill-advised, as many of these knuckleheads go around heavily armed.

Did I mention a safe neighborhood? Last week there was a homicide at a bar a couple of blocks from our house. The doorman, a universally popular fellow, told a guy he couldn’t carry his drink outside. The idiot came back with a pistol and shot him dead. They showed a remarkably clear photo of the killer on TV and arrested him the next morning—a 23-year-old from across the river.

Two lives destroyed over nothing.

But it’s not just where I live. (Little Rock.) Increasingly bad behavior is nationwide. Auto fatalities, to stick with a relatively non-politicized issue for the moment, are up sharply since the Covid pandemic began. Although traffic volumes diminished with many working from home (or not working), car crash deaths rose fully 18.4 percent in 2021.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “the main behaviors that drove this increase include: impaired driving, speeding, and failure to wear a seat belt.” It appears that some of the same jerks who resented face masks compensated by unbuckling their seat bels.

Why am I not surprised?

“If there was a way to make the driving experience less safe for drivers, less safe for passengers, or less safe for everyone else on the road,” Matt Yglesias comments “people did it.”

At the nation’s airports, there has been an epidemic of unruly passenger behavior—people punching gate attendants, slapping flight attendants, even trying to break into cockpits. Mostly over face masks.

May I offer you another cocktail, sir?

Elsewhere, drug overdose fatalities are up, there’s been an increase in attacks on health care workers, and schools across the country report a sharp uptick in disruptive behavior by students.

A substantial proportion of our fellow Americans are simply losing it. There’s even been a rise in comedian-slapping at the Oscars.

Writing in The Atlantic, Olga Khazan wonders why: “In 2020, the U.S. murder rate rose by nearly a third, the biggest increase on record, then rose again in 2021. Car thefts spiked 14 percent last year, and carjackings have surged in various cities. And if there were a national tracker of school-board-meeting hissy fits, it would be heaving with data points right now.”

Indeed, it’s no longer shocking to hear of school board members receiving death threats—a dubious honor that used to be reserved for such minor public figures as newspaper columnists.

Maybe I’m losing my edge, however, as it’s been months since anybody has vowed to murder me (I do block threatening emailers). Personal abuse, however, has risen sharply. Name-calling is way up, and reading comprehension is down. It’s remarkable how few people can follow an argument that hits their personal hot spots.

Quote something our former president has said in praise of noted humanitarian Vladimir Putin and you’re a “liar!" afflicted with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” An awful lot of these people sound like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginny, i.e. like cranks haunted by imaginary conspiracies and dreaming of vengeance.

For the most part, I agree with The Atlantic’s Khazan that the “rage, frustration, and stress” coursing through American society have a lot to do with Covid, and attendant feelings of fear, frustration and sorrow.

Loneliness too.

“The pandemic” she writes, “loosened ties between people: Kids stopped going to school; their parents stopped going to work; parishioners stopped going to church; people stopped gathering, in general.” Most experts she consulted—psychiatrists, criminologists, and social historians—believe that as our social interactions return to normal, our collective behavior will also improve.

Color me skeptical, but I think that the decay of journalism in the age of Fox News and the derangements of social media have done permanent harm. Mere facts no longer persuade.. The propaganda term “Fake News” has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Millions believe nothing they don’t wish to believe. They have utter contempt for anybody who disagrees.

That won’t change painlessly.

Rate Of Fatal Overdoses Involving Pain Medications Slows, CDC Says

Rate Of Fatal Overdoses Involving Pain Medications Slows, CDC Says

By Lisa Girion, Los Angeles Times

Fatal overdoses involving prescription painkillers have increased every year for more than a decade, but a government study has found for the first time that the rate is slowing.

Before 2006, the age-adjusted rate of painkiller-involved deaths grew by 18 percent per year, according to a report issued Tuesday by the National Center for Health Statistics. Since then, however, the death rate increased by 3 percent per year, the study found.

But the encouraging trend was not uniform. The number of deaths involving OxyContin, Vicodin, and other widely prescribed opioid painkillers continued their steady and steep climb through 2011, the last year included in the analysis.

The slowdown was driven largely by a decrease in overdoses involving methadone, the study said. Methadone is an opioid that is both prescribed by doctors for pain relief and dispensed at clinics to help recovering addicts stay off heroin and other narcotics.

Over the 12-year period from 1999 to 2011, the age-adjusted rate of painkiller deaths nearly quadrupled, reaching 5.4 per 100,000, according to the report. That translated to 16,917 deaths in 2011.

The greatest increases occurred among people aged 55 to 64 and non-Latino whites.

The study also highlighted the growing role of anti-anxiety drugs, known as benzodiazepines. Xanax, Valium, and other benzodiazepines were involved in 31 percent of the painkiller deaths, up from 13 percent in 1999.

The National Center for Health Statistics is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Photo: epSos.de via Flickr

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Trying To Prevent Heroin Deaths One Shot At A Time

Trying To Prevent Heroin Deaths One Shot At A Time

By Jean Marbella, The Baltimore Sun

BALTIMORE — Robert Taylor Jr., and Camille Haviland thought they were being safe — within the bounds of their dangerous heroin habit, that is.

Having bought from a new dealer, Taylor tried just one capsule instead of his usual three or four. Haviland left on an errand; when she returned 15 minutes later, she found him collapsed on the ground, bluish and not breathing.

She started CPR. When paramedics arrived, they injected Taylor with the overdose-reversing drug naloxone.

“At the time, I would have liked to have had this,” Haviland said recently after she and Taylor were trained and certified to administer the drug themselves. “I’ve had a lot of friends die because people just left them.”

Maryland health officials, desperate to stem an 88 percent rise in heroin overdose deaths from 2011 to 2013, have launched an initiative to put naloxone into the hands of addicts, their families, police, and other nonmedical personnel.

Heroin in particular is taking a toll: Of the 848 people in Maryland who died of drug or alcohol intoxication last year, 464 overdosed on heroin. The grim trend continues this year: In the first three months, the most recent for which statistics are available, 148 of the 252 who died had used heroin.

The city and region have struggled for decades with high rates of heroin addiction, but fatalities are on the rise here, as elsewhere in the country, as purer forms of the drug, or formulations that include another potent opioid, fentanyl, become more widely available, health officials say.

As a result, states increasingly are turning to naloxone, also known by its brand name, Narcan, which reverses overdoses of heroin and other opioids such as oxycodone, but not of cocaine and other drugs. In 2012, then-federal drug czar Gil Kerlikowske called for broadening naloxone’s availability, saying that for some addicts it could be “the difference between life and death.”

Taylor and Haviland, who attended a class at the Howard County Health Department in Columbia last month, started methadone programs during the winter and say they are committed to their recovery. They say having naloxone in their apartment in Laurel gives them a sense of security in case of an emergency.

“I hope I never have to use it,” Haviland said. “We both have a lot of goals now. We’re just tired of getting high. We want a life, we want something better.”

Naloxone works by attaching itself to the same parts of the brain that receive heroin and other opioids, and reversing the effects of the drugs.

Photo: Baltimore Sun/MCT/Haddock Taylor

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DEA Tightens Controls On Hydrocodone Painkiller Drugs

DEA Tightens Controls On Hydrocodone Painkiller Drugs

By Lisa Girion, Los Angeles Times

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is putting tighter controls on the nation’s most widely prescribed narcotic painkiller in a move to stem an epidemic of addiction, overdose, and death.
The agency said it would publish a rule Friday to place hydrocodone combination products, such as Vicodin and Norco, in the same category as other frequently abused medications, including OxyContin and fentanyl.

Once the rule takes effect in 45 days, all hydrocodone products will be considered Schedule II drugs — pharmaceuticals with accepted medical uses but also the highest potential for harm and abuse. Patients will see new restrictions on prescriptions and refills, and pharmacies will have to follow stricter procedures for handling and storage of the drugs.

Hydrocodone products are among the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States. Americans consume 99 percent of the hydrocodone produced worldwide, according to the International Narcotics Control Board.

But these drugs and other narcotic painkillers cause or contribute to more than 16,000 deaths annually, a death toll greater than for heroin and cocaine combined. As a result of a surge in prescription overdoses, drug fatalities have surpassed deaths from motor vehicle crashes, long the leading cause of accidental death in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A Los Angeles Times analysis of 3,733 prescription-drug-related fatalities in Southern California from 2006 through 2011 found that hydrocodone was involved in 945 of the deaths, more than any other prescription medication.

Doctors have prescribed painkillers containing hydrocodone and acetaminophen with few restrictions since the combination drugs were introduced four decades ago. Because of the perception that products such as Vicodin are less risky than other narcotic painkillers, they are widely prescribed by general practitioners and dentists.

But drug enforcement officials have long complained that hydrocodone is widely abused.

“Almost 7 million Americans abuse controlled-substance prescription medications, including opioid painkillers,” DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart said Thursday. “Today’s action recognizes that these products are some of the most addictive and potentially dangerous prescription medications available.”

For years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration resisted tighter rules on hydrocodone products out of concern that they would make it more difficult for patients with legitimate pain to obtain the medication. The DEA asked the agency to reconsider its position in light of the drug’s widespread availability on the black market.

In early 2013, the American Academy of Pain Medicine sent an FDA advisory panel a letter saying that although it had some concern that tighter rules could curtail legitimate prescribing, it did not oppose moving hydrocodone to Schedule II.

Days later, the advisory panel voted 19-10 in favor of greater restrictions, setting the rescheduling process in motion.

In seeking to stem the increase in fatal drug overdoses, authorities have focused on how addicts and drug dealers obtain prescription narcotics illegally, such as by stealing from pharmacies or relatives’ medicine cabinets. The Times investigation, however, found that many fatal overdoses were caused by drugs prescribed for the deceased by a doctor.

In nearly half of the prescription drug fatalities in four Southern California counties, medications prescribed by physicians caused or contributed to the death, according to the Times analysis of coroners’ records.

In response to the investigation, Gov. Jerry Brown signed two bills aimed at cracking down on reckless prescribing. And Proposition 46, a ballot initiative that will go before California voters in November, would require doctors to check the state’s prescription drug monitoring program, known as CURES, before prescribing powerful drugs such as Vicodin.

Photo: massdistraction via Flickr

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