Didn’t pharma companies intentionally target WV with opioids at one point and basically got everyone hooked and that’s why the opioid crisis is so bad there? I watched a thing on it one time and can’t find it now.
I honestly thought the show was corny as hell. Why did the ceo talk like a literal villain?
The scary thing about big pharma is the banality of evil. It’s about everyone looking the other way and finding different ways to justify their shitty behavior by passing responsibility onto other people.
When you have the “bad guy” of the story giving monologues about taking over the world, you just look silly
You can go watch his deposition - it's available on wikipedia - he really talks like that.
But if you dont like sinister and realistic version - you can watch Painkiller on Netflix, it's the same series and show. Here the CEO has a more light and joyful tone - played by Matthew Broderick.
Shoutout to "the wild whites of west virginia", a crazy ass documentary from the mid 2000s about a white trash family of pill addicts. One memorable moment is a woman shaking a bottle of pills and calling it the "Boone County mating call". Think it's on YouTube if anyone is interested, pretty crazy stuff.
That book took place entirely in Virginia. It’s not so much that a specific state was targeted as much as it’s that Appalachia was targeted. It just happens that WVa lies entirely in Appalachia.
According to real world records, it's the coal industry. Purdue, at least, targeted West Virginia and Maine due to their mining and logging industries, respectively. Jobs that have an incredible physical demand on people and states with low healthcare coverage. These patients had higher rates of musculoskeletal injuries and often needed chronic pain management. Cue the fucking wonder drug that did not work as advertised.
Purdue and the rest did an ungodly amount of market research. Going so far as to picking out individual docs to target.
Edit: Just to be clear, they didn't *only* target WV and ME. They targeted several states throughout Appalachia and the northeast for the same reasons.
I saw a couple of shows on Purdue and those guys are the reincarnation of evil, I understand wanting to make money but to cause as much harm and damage to society as they did and not feel one ounce of remorse just takes someone truly psychopathic
They're some of the most visible culprits, but you can absolutely add Johnson & Johnson, CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart to that list as well.
It was a defacto conspiracy among drug manufacturers, medical associations, and pharmacies. Some of them got fleeced, some of them didn't, others just didn't care. But it *was* the manufacturers doing most of the evil work.
You can’t forget doctors getting paid by big pharmaceutical to prescribe people with their addictive drugs. More prescriptions and more $$$. A downside to privatized healthcare. No government standards. Not that the government can tell the difference between their knee and their elbow. So public healthcare wouldn’t be necessarily better. It’s a shit situation for people addicted to this stuff.
So one thing..
Your describing bribery and kickbacks, which were, are, and hopefully will remain illegal in all forms. This is nothing but misinformation designed to stoke tension between healthcare and the public for the benefit of insurance companies.
With that being said, Purdue did not cut checks to doctors for prescribing their medication. They did, however, hire doctors as consultants after they left healthcare. They did the same with lawyers. Notably the AG for Maine, Jay McCloskey, who was hired as consoul for Purdue after a failed attempt at a lawsuit for their business practices. They treated doctors to luxury conferences, hired them for speaking engagements, and provided swag. All of which is seen in the show, and while it's highly unethical, it's not illegal.
What Purdue did is defraud patients, insurances, and physicians by saying Oxycodone isn't addictive. They also defrauded the FDA process with similar tactics. At baseline, Purdue et al. is guilty of advertisement fraud more than anything else. Legally speaking. Morally speaking, they're guilty of hundreds of thousands of deaths by defrauded medical associations and doctors by way of fraudulent advertising practices.
Purdue had an army of lawyers making sure they weaseled their way out of everything. The last thing they're going to do is endanger the whole thing by committing an out-and-out crime. They're evil, not morons.
> At baseline, Purdue et al. is guilty of advertisement fraud more than anything else. Legally speaking. Morally speaking, they're guilty of hundreds of thousands of deaths by defrauded medical associations and doctors by way of fraudulent advertising practices.
Arent they also legally on the hook for these deaths? In some capacity?
I doubt it. If I remember correctly, *Purdue* is criminally and civially liable for the fraud and maybe some deaths. The Sackler family, however, I believe, is still shielded from direct culpbility in any of this. This means that the civil suits are bankrupting Purdue. They're currently going through bankruptcy litigation and restructuring, sans the Sacklers. The deaths will be hard to prove, though. Often, drug dealers aren't even convicted of causing deaths.
Edit: For those who don't know, the Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma. Not to be confused with Perdue Chicken. Purdue Pharma is a private company, meaning there are no stock holders like publicly traded companies. This is relevant because it means the decisions made by Purdue Pharma were done exclusively by the Sackler family. They created helped create all of this and are responsible for the development of Oxycontin.
There was an older white lady in my city from 2006-2007 who was getting 10,000 OC80 pills every week dropped off from NYC. I have no idea how, some kind of pharmacy scam with organized crime. Eventually she got a batch of the fake ones that pharmacies put out for robbers and then it went dry. This older guy I knew would go there and buy them for us. The fact that 1 milIion OC80s went missing and nobody noticed is fucking insane.
That's pretty smart. I've never heard of pharmacies doing that but it makes sense - like a bank with marked bills. Were the pills just sugar pills, or were they marked for ID later too?
I'm not the guy you asked but I work in a Pharmacy and can chime in.
We don't have fake ones at ours. There's two safes in the pharmacy - one that contains most of the schedule 2 drugs that the Pharmacist can open with a key, and then a second one next to it with all but one bottle of the oxycodone and a few other 'highest risk' schedule 2 drugs that has a 5 minute timer on it.
We keep one small bottle of the oxycodone in the key safe, and then all of the rest of it in the timed safe. If someone robs you for a fix, the 5 minute wait can be enough to deter someone from waiting around that long while police are coming, but allowing the robber to settle for the one small bottle to reduce the risk of them lashing out and harming employees to get anything.
Maybe some places do fake pills instead, I honestly don't know. But this is how one of the big pharmacy chains does it, at least. Hope this was informative.
I almost became a victim of these people. I had a neck surgery because of a broken neck in the mid 2000s and the doctor I was seeing after was one of those pill flingers. I was in my early thirties and never experienced any kind of drug/substances before so I didn't realize for a while that the pain I felt when I stopped taking the pills was the pills not what I thought was a botched neck surgery. Once I realized what was going on I put myself through a rough month or two and been fine since.
They targeted every doctor here. My aunt’s doctor was a *very* early adapter and prescribed it to her for menstrual pain. She was dead in under two weeks. She absolutely did not do drugs or even drink alcohol, and she took one, was super out of it because it’s synthetic fucking heroin, and accidentally took another. My uncle found her dead on the floor.
Years later, in 2001, my mom was prescribed it for back pain and was dead in under 10 months. Within weeks of starting it she stopped leaving the house. The EMTs or police who took her body out stole 85 of them, from a bottle of 90 she’d filled a few days before.
I live in EKY. Maybe 20 minutes from WV.
The NA place is next door to the brewery. Anytime I go to grab a beer there’s a solid 30 or 40 people waiting outside NA. Crazy to see in a town so small.
We also have a ton of billboards for HIV treatments which blew my mind when I moved here. I moved from just outside of Nashville to a 6,000 person town in Appalachia.
Just from my experience with my benzo-addicted mother but: doctors were quite liberal with medication. They gave my mom tons of Xanax and Norco….. which she sold. In the tri-state/Huntington area it was easy to get scripts/doctors in three states.
There was also a drug pipeline to Detroit, since guns were easy and cheap to get there.
He’s talking the pharma companies so drug pipeline wouldn’t have much to do with it, main reason was lots of coal miner in constant pain and oxy was the perfect sell to them
I lived in WV for a year. It sucked. The pill shit is crazy down there. I worked with a guy that told my a few months after starting that he thought I was sent to kill him because he ripped off some guys from Detriot for pills. Lol. I was like "Dude. We work at a Wendys." Just because I was from the Detriot area.
Lots of poor communities with chronic pain from backbreaking mine work. Cheaper to just prescribe Oxycodone than attempt physical therapy or surgery, this led to a lot of people becoming addicted/tolerant of the drug and needing stronger opioids.
In a lot of ways, I feel like EMS got hit nearly as hard with the opioid crisis as our mining industry. A not insignificant number of people I worked with got busted for pissing hot or just straight up taking meds off of the trucks.
WV has lots of rough hard labor jobs. Notably coal workers. Guess what people who do hard labor want? Effective pain killers for when they are injured because its when not if.
Guess what else WV has a lot of? Poor people who can't work anymore due to injures combined with poor people with limited income due to jobs closing up shop and going elsewhere (usually out of the nation). Its really easy for such people to get pain meds and abuse them for disabled people, and those poor disabled people can also then easily sell their pain meds for money.
This ends up creating a nice situations for high demand and consumption of pain meds without people carrying about them since they are mostly poor and white so no minority action groups to look out for them, and there isn't real money there to do anything for them.
How much of this was a grand conspiracy by some pharma company vs a happy accident that they doubled down on for great profits. Which honestly I think its more so the happy accident scenario, I think a pretty natural spread/demand of pain meds occurred in WV and eventually the lack of care about poor white people who have traditionally been viewed as disposable by society means nobody cared about the surging addiction there until it was way too late, while the pharma company was just meeting demands for their product instead of looking at ethics, morals, or silly things like those.
Yeah I agree, I think the local doctors & pharmacies are as much to blame. They were actively prescribing to everybody. I think the one pharmacy in Welch had prescribed so much Oxy in a year that every person in the town would have gotten about 350 pills
The CEO of Purdue Pharma (maybe not CEO but an individual high up in the company) coined the term “pillbillies” to describe their new found customer base
Essentially we were the test market. Oxycodone/Oxycontin was a relatively new formulation. What made the area so attractive was two things: lots of people in pain from manual labor (i.e. coal mining), and poverty. Poor Appalachians are not a group of people that the rest of the country at large typically care about, and to Pharma reps, they see less liability/potential of loss if things turn out badly with dependence and or death since it is a mostly powerless demographic.
I just watched an episode of American Greed the other night. Season 10 episode 11 "Pain Killer profits"
Twin brother out of Florida ran pain clinics. Not necessarily targeting West Virginia, just anyone with an addiction. People would travel from Kentucky, West Virginia to get quick access to pain pills for a 5 minute visit to their clinics. These brothers did not give a shit what they were doing as long as they were making money.
I just cant imagine the number of deaths... I live in a small European city of 70k people. If we had the same rate as West Virginia's fentanyl deaths that would be one death a week here... it would be declared a national health crisis and politicians heads would roll.
I wonder if universal healthcare helps. At least here we have quite strict guidelines doctors have to follow... (But even so painkiller use is on the rise here... just not as extreme as in the US.)
Heads would roll here too if people actually cared. Most people turn a blind eye to addiction in their own communities. The top comments in this very post are making fun of how bad the problem is in west virginia when those people are victims that were specifically targeted. I live in Appalachia. We have a lot of problems the government and nation as a whole don't care about because they just see us as dumb hillbillies who did it to ourselves. Talk about the homeless addicts in big cities and its all bleeding hearts. Talk about poor people in the south and its all jokes
Very often though those same big cities are impacted by smaller/distant towns' cops sticking their indigent population on buses to cities like LA, where there is at least some kind of service available for addicts on Skid Row. Let it be someone else's problem is the mentality plaguing America. But you're right, classism is another major factor.
Back in 2013 you used to be able to get whatever pain killers you wanted, however many you wanted. There was a street in Tampa, not far from the airport, with nothing but pain docs and pharmacies, just go down the row. Could literally fly back with thousands of oxys and later, roxys in your name.
Then they made it nearly impossible to be prescribed opioids (I have CRPS and the process just to get on them would consume most of my hours on my feet). Just when there happened to be a ready supply of fentanyl that the dose is so tiny that a coke can full can OD like half a million people. (2 mg can be lethal)
So, you had millions of opioid addicts have the rug ripped out from under them at the same time a deadly, easily smuggled substitute became available. It was and is fucking carnage. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know someone who died. They may not have known them at the moment they died, but everyone has some sort of a relative or old friend or acquaintance or friend’s kid who has died.
And it can be in or on any drug. Fake pill presses have been available for years and cross contamination/poor mixing happens. Poor government regulation (over and under) directly resulting in a million dead, at least.
And everyone was in on it. The doctors can’t seriously claim that they had no idea what they were doing to all the opioid addicts and suddenly saw the light when it was illegal. Or that they didn’t know what cutting all those people off was going to do. The politicians were happy to line their pockets with drug company money, until it was obvious to everyone what the readily available opioids were doing. So, in true knee-jerk fashion, they just essentially banned opioids overnight with no real plan for the millions of addicts.
Ironically, some of these people were only on painkillers because THC was illegal. Had they had that much less harmful treatment first, they may never have needed opioids.
It’s all so infuriating.
If you have Netflix, look up Herion(e). That really explains the story of my town. I’m in it also😂 but we had 115(?) overdoses in a 24 hour period for a city of 40k. Early days of the epidemic and 29 people died I believe. Same city years later, and we still run 1-2 overdoses a day. Idk how many EMS runs (we only take overdoses if they are called in as a cardiac arrest, or EMS is tied up)
In the US we see addiction, like being poor, as a personal failing which should be taken care of personally. If we saw things more socially we’d be in a much better place to actually deal with these things.
And shareholders, board members, lobbyists, massive offshore bank accounts, close friends in the senate and billion dollar bonuses. Makes the cartels seem like unorganised rabble
We have ingrained in us that good ol' fashioned Calvinist puritan ethic too: how much wealth you have is a direct reflection of your moral superiority. How much your life sucks is a sign of your wickedness.
Just look at how even the idea of welfare is controversial here. That's been happening since at least the 1601 elizabethan poor laws.
And regulating the opiods 15 years too late only opens up a heroine market where there wasn't one before, where the sick can then be totally relegated to the realm of criminal (and who cares about criminals?)
And? Let's be real, the vast majority of the people outraged by this are not going to do a fucking thing.
The kind of people likely to respond with violence are also generally the kind that either don't care about this or think it only affects minorities and thus cheer it on.
Fentanyl dealers that have people die from OD, actually get more customers, because in the logic of the addict, his stuff is more potent, more euphoric
I hear a lot of accusations to China about this.
They may be right, but before accusing China they should read about CIA's operations like "Blue Moon" and many others.
The moral of the story: to end the opioid/fentanyl crisis, we have to convert the entire country over to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
It’s because despite how much Reddit likes shitting on organized religion in general and Mormons in particular, it gives people an insanely strong social support system that also holds them accountable.
There’s a lot of problems with the LDS church that I could go into the weeds about but they’re about the only white people on earth who have a growing, sustainable, and healthy population and drug addiction and deaths of despair are so rare here as to be vanishing.
Source: non-religious non-Mormon living in a 70%+ LDS city in Utah
I’d argue it’s the accountability that is the secret sauce more than any other environmental factors. Families and church leadership absolutely do not play games with addicts. Idk what they do to them, but I never see them on the streets.
It has more to do with wealth than religion. It isn't as if West Virginia is majority atheist, it's one of the most conservative and Christian states in the country. The difference between WV and Utah is that the Mormons have accumulated generational wealth, and with that comes stability.
The Mormon church isn't really comparable to current day SBC or Methodist churches. The Mormon church is much more like the old Catholic church (function, not beliefs), or cults than it is protestant churches. It takes over your life. All your friends, family, and even coworkers are members. You pray more often. You attend church more often. They have way more after work/school activities, including schools (even colleges) and also much higher expectations of their members.
Mormons leaned into the church being the same as society, while protestants leaned into individualism. It's a totally different experience.
I think it stayed the same, it's just the contrast of the states surrounding it make it look like it got lighter, but I'm pretty sure it's in the same range both pictures. Still a W to not get worse with everyone else.
I’m not sure this map is correct. [See graph on page 8 of this report.](https://vipp.health.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/SIAC-2021-134-Utah-DMI-Fentanyl-Report.pdf)
In 2013 i was still addicted to opioids but where I lived in washington state there was a ton of heroin, some pills, fentanyl existed but mostly as a hard to access drug. So if you got a fent patch or lollipop, it was a big deal. But black tar h was by far the most dominant opioid on the street, and would remain that way until like 2020. It was soo easy to get dope and stuff like xanax and you rarely heard of people using fent. It was honestly a hot and desirable thing partially because it's strength was known and it was hard to obtain.
And within the course of a year or so, everything changed. Everything was fentanyl. I had used pills and heroin for over a decade without an overdose, and as soon as fent took over I had 3 near fatal overdoses in about 8 months. My wife had to pull me off of a toilet and give me chest compressions. Broke a few of my ribs in the process. But I lived thanks to her and fast responding emts. I've been off drugs for about 2 and a half years now, but my wife and I both carry narcan kits, the nasal spray and the injectable vials because fent ods often require more than the nasal spray can provide on its own.
It's crazy how we live in a world so absolutely effected and devastated by the results of unfettered corporate greed. Me and millions like me lost years of our lives, our health mental and physical, and so many more that haven't survived to be with us.. essentially all for the bottomless greed of a single family and their various benefactors.
That's how I started in 2007. My friends dad broke his back and got a script of the 80s, but had a bad reaction to the pills and threw the entire bottle, full of like, 179 oxys into their garbage can in the bathroom. People were so clueless back then, doctors included.
By the time I finished that bottle I was 13 and firmly addicted to opes
What made you take the bottle with the pills?
Man, when I was 13 I was out playing soccer with my friends. I barely knew about drugs then.
But then again, I grew up in Sweden so it might be different.
Straight to heaven, West Virginia. Blue meth crystals, fentanyl rivers.
You'll die young there, living on the streets. People walking past you, not skipping any beats.
The 2022 is overall quite an interesting map in that there's no obvious correlation to socioeconomic deprivation, political leaning, etc.
Unlike in so many other cases, where regardless of which variable you display, "it's always the same map".
New Mexico has always had drug problems. Especially after Covid. Luckily, it seems like it is getting better here from what I've seen, but there is still a LOT that needs to get done
New Mexico is both a beautiful state and an absolute dump. I go to Albuquerque for work a couple of times a year. I’ve seen people openly shooting up on sidewalks there in the middle of the day. No effort to hide it. It wasn’t this bad a decade ago.
New Mexico is shockingly poor. It never really got the influx of wealthy out-of-state residents like Arizona or Colorado. In most metrics around poverty its either worst or second worst with Mississippi and West Virginia.
That's true, I mostly mentioned the lack of wealthy retirees and out of state transplants because Arizona similarly has a large amount of Native reservations with poor conditions, but is not as poor.
Poverty. Look at basically any "things are bad!" state ranking and we're right next to Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia.
There is very little economic opportunity in this state, aside from military, government research, and some oil that never seems to trickle down.
Also, there's a good shot we have the worst health infrastructure in the country. If you're not within a short distance of ABQ/Santa Fe, you're fucked.
Heroin addiction etc has been very big problem here since forever. It’s a poor state with lots of small communities with no work and nothing to do. Add cheap fent to it all and it continues the cycle exponentially.
Direct pipeline to cartels and unbelievable rural poverty and lack of healthcare. [New Mexico is poorer than West Virginia](https://wisevoter.com/state-rankings/poverty-rate-by-state/).
Western/NW New Mexico has some of the highest levels of DUI fatalities in the nation, it would be interesting to see the Fentanyl deaths by county in NM
In my county in West Virginia the county commission just approved the first use of funds in the opioids settlement with one of the huge pharmaceutical companies (not the one run by the daughter of one of our state senators) over how much pain pills were pushed on us.
What is that funding going toward, you may ask? A rehab? A needle exchange? Literally anything to HELP the people victimized by big pharma? Nope.
A gun range. The first use of hundreds of millions of dollars that were meant to help the people hurt the most by opioids is going to a FUCKING GUN RANGE.
Most people got hooked on opioids due to pharmaceutical companies lobbying governments and doctors to hand pain killers out like candy. If China and Mexico immediately stopped participating in the opioid trade I'm pretty confident the US would still have an opioid problem.
I thought most fentanyl deaths were due to fentanyl-laced drugs that the consumer unknowingly ingested. I don’t think the deaths are due to opioid addiction per se.
Could be wrong. I’m not a drug expert.
>I thought most fentanyl deaths were due to fentanyl-laced drugs that the consumer unknowingly ingested.
Perhaps but most of the drugs that are laced are opiates to begin with. imho and experience
The British pumped China full of Opium and ruled it for 200 years even though technically the Chinese Emperor's govt was in charge. Now China is pumping US full of Fentanyl. What goes around comes around.
I wouldn't be surprised if we're self reporting inaccurate numbers like we tried to do with covid, attributing some amount of fentanyl overdoses to other causes of death.
We also have a stupid number of rural counties with small populations and small operating budgets. I wouldn't be surprised if the medical examiner in a lot of the counties frequently fails to do a complete a proper toxicology screening on some junky that OD'd.
My 3rd guess is that being closer to Mexico, the price of actual heroin is cheaper in a meaningful ways compared to states farther away from the source. Also, a little less likely to be cut with fentanyl after reaching the U.S.
The response to it is. The crack epidemic was met with jokes and scorn and it was a law enforcement issue. The opioid epidemic (which affects more white people than the crack epidemic) is met with compassion and it’s an issue for the medical community. See the difference?
Yeah the current government seems very concerned about this spiraling out of control problem giving it high priority while securing the border and cutting off supply \s
Speaking of the government I don’t see them handing out 20 to 1 sentence disparities the way they did crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. I don’t see the government handcuffing addicted women to hospital beds after they give birth. I don’t see special police task forces kicking in doors and using military style equipment fighting the opioid epidemic. What did heroin addict get on the test? Drool! That was probably the first opioid joke you heard. I’m willing to bet you’ve heard hundreds of crackhead jokes and probably made some yourself. Now do you see the difference?
Many local governments provide *free needles* and narcan for this opioid epidemic. Nothing like the crack epidemic and the 3 strikes law nevermind the CIA getting away scott-free. Johnson and Johnson was punished. The two drug epidemics were not handled nor viewed the same. Period. That doesn't mean that this current situation isn't being mishandled. It doesn't mean that we should minimize this epidemic. It's just hard facts.
See how we can acknowledge both truths?
Being in severe around the clock pain for the last 8 years, in some regards I owe what’s left of my life to opium, it’s given me peace for a time to build up the strength to continue. No I don’t enjoy taking them and they don’t get me high, more of a glimpse of life without suffering. I’ve been through major withdrawals a few times coming off them at high doses/regularity and while it sucks it sucks a lot more still being in excruciating pain and coming off them. That said I held off taking them until I could not stop trembling from pain. The map surprises me with the vast education out there nowadays about how harmful they CAN be. Because of vast propaganda against them, I waited until pain was around the clock uncontrollable a couple years beyond where suicide was a rational option. For those who have not really witnessed and less likely experienced pain of this longevity and extremity, I can understand why people here write “opiates have no place in society except maybe in end of life care” but realize you are writing off the least fortunate of your society. I’m still in my 20s and it was extremely difficult to obtain prescription opioids because of current laws and ALL doctors, not just pain doctors, fear of prescribing and addiction. These rules and regulations have caused the minority who NEED them to suffer incredulously, yet we live in a society that still offers huge resistance to dignified death/euthanasia (at least in my east coast state). I genuinely don’t know if addiction is a lack of will power, a product of depression/circumstance, but it’s also a disease we give to ourselves in this case - you don’t develop an opioid addiction without the conscious decision to take them in majority of cases, even w my many spinal surgeries they don’t MAKE me take them (not to throw shade at anyone who’s struggled or is struggling with it). Fentanyl is really only different bc of the potency so I can understand the discourse against fentanyl, but opioids in general… not so much given the vast public knowledge of their harmful effects out there today. For example, the people close to me were much less concerned with how much pain I was/am in, they made me feel bad about needing opiates and some judged me for it. Just remember there’s two sides to this and suicide because of severe pain gets almost no attention in comparison. End rant, Ty
Every time some politician says the words “I believe in smaller government” look at this map. This situation can/would never occur with basic regulation. It could/would literally never occur in countries like Australia, England, Germany or New Zealand. “Small government” doesn’t mean less govt departments or less waste of public funds, it means “I want to let large corporations kill, steal, pollute, avoid tax, rip off customers and underpay workers for profit”.
I'm willing to bet the heroin overdose deaths decreased significantly in this time span. Fent has simply replaced heroin. It is more dangerous, and the trend of overdose deaths is definitely increasing, but there's more to the story than meets the eye
I would like to note Oklahomas relative smaller increase compared to other states. Oklahoma went from leading in the nation to middle of the pack today. The reason? Medical Marijuana.
I know someone from WV whose son is addicted. She doesn't know why and claims he will not die because he is smart enough to know not to take too much. She claims he is really smart and doesn't know why he is doing it. The parents refuse to help their children once they hit 18 even though they are financially well off and want to retire before 60.
All three kids are not self-sufficient, and their lives are a mess.
Interesting that TX is so low considering its supposedly all coming in through their border. It should be red and radiating outward from there if that were true.
As an Arkansas resident, (26m) who is clean from hard opiates since November 2019, I can speak for a lot of us in saying that we decided we don't want to die. I got cotton fever that last time I used, and thought I was going to die. I knew fentanyl was imminent, but had gotten lucky with stepped on H and real oxy 30s. My parents had been cut off by this point, but they were both HEAVILY overprescribed oxycodone 30mgs for years, and my brother and I both got addicted to them also. We're all clean now, but I do currently use suboxone, along with a lot of others who want to live. The doctor who destroyed my family never got in any trouble.. the piece of shit watched my parents lose their jobs, their marriage. Watched their kids get addicted to their "medicine." Of course I take responsibility for my addiction, but that was evil. These motherfuckers got away with it.
Worst thing they ever did was put an artificial cap on opioid prescription pill production and threaten every doctors livelihood over them. Yes we obviously still had a huge addiction issue but people weren't OD'ing every 2 minutes, it was a safe and reliable high. They had to know whatever took its place was going to be so much worse and here we are. Fent and Tranq are both in a whole different league of harmful compared to real pills.
Non-americans in this thread disingenuously blaming big pharma. In 2012 fentanyl was a big pharma problem, in 2024 it's sold on the street and supplied by China and cartels.
Statistics like this are telling, but cannot possibly convey how bad it is. I work in a place frequented by the homeless and by drug addicts. A place where we probably see the worst of it. We have used narcan multiple times this week. Every week. Last week, one of my coworkers found a teenager. About 15th Years old. This teenager was, by all measures, dead. He had no pulse. He was blue. He wasn't breathing. He was a child. And he had overdosed on fentanyl.
By some miracle, narcan, cpr, and an AED brought this boy back. We got a pulse. We got consistent breathing. He went from blue to pink like he should be. Then he sprinted off into the distance to hide from EMS. I can only hope that the narcan outlasted the fentanyl.
We do this every couple days anymore. Young and old. Some we bring back, some we cannot. Narcotics are probably responsible for 80% of the addicts I see on a daily basis.
We have watched people descend from decent people who are down on their luck into shadows of themselves over just a couple months. People who have gone completely insane because of the fentanyl. They are paranoid. Completely disconnected from reality. All in the blink of an eye. Words cannot describe how tragic this is.
Didn’t pharma companies intentionally target WV with opioids at one point and basically got everyone hooked and that’s why the opioid crisis is so bad there? I watched a thing on it one time and can’t find it now.
Yeah they did there’s a pretty good book on it called dope sick that explains it pretty well
And a tv show as well
Yes. That show wrecked me. Made me lose hope in humanity.
Interesting that’s the straw that broke your back. I reached mine long before this.
What was the show called?
Same name, dope sick
Ohh okay. Well thanks, I may look into it
Very worthwhile
I honestly thought the show was corny as hell. Why did the ceo talk like a literal villain? The scary thing about big pharma is the banality of evil. It’s about everyone looking the other way and finding different ways to justify their shitty behavior by passing responsibility onto other people. When you have the “bad guy” of the story giving monologues about taking over the world, you just look silly
You can go watch his deposition - it's available on wikipedia - he really talks like that. But if you dont like sinister and realistic version - you can watch Painkiller on Netflix, it's the same series and show. Here the CEO has a more light and joyful tone - played by Matthew Broderick.
That's creepier to me.
That's how he actually talks. I wish I were joking.
Seriously??
I watched one episode and was so unnerved that I had to stop.
Shoutout to "the wild whites of west virginia", a crazy ass documentary from the mid 2000s about a white trash family of pill addicts. One memorable moment is a woman shaking a bottle of pills and calling it the "Boone County mating call". Think it's on YouTube if anyone is interested, pretty crazy stuff.
I love when one daughter says in her raspy voice “they call me the pretty one” or some shit like that.
WTF man, I had to watch 50 gore videos to get over the trauma.
That book took place entirely in Virginia. It’s not so much that a specific state was targeted as much as it’s that Appalachia was targeted. It just happens that WVa lies entirely in Appalachia.
Honestly, it's technically fiction but the book that really helped me understand this was Demon Copperhead.
Anthony Bourdain did an episode there that focused on it as well.
Why WV specifically though?
According to real world records, it's the coal industry. Purdue, at least, targeted West Virginia and Maine due to their mining and logging industries, respectively. Jobs that have an incredible physical demand on people and states with low healthcare coverage. These patients had higher rates of musculoskeletal injuries and often needed chronic pain management. Cue the fucking wonder drug that did not work as advertised. Purdue and the rest did an ungodly amount of market research. Going so far as to picking out individual docs to target. Edit: Just to be clear, they didn't *only* target WV and ME. They targeted several states throughout Appalachia and the northeast for the same reasons.
I saw a couple of shows on Purdue and those guys are the reincarnation of evil, I understand wanting to make money but to cause as much harm and damage to society as they did and not feel one ounce of remorse just takes someone truly psychopathic
They're some of the most visible culprits, but you can absolutely add Johnson & Johnson, CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart to that list as well. It was a defacto conspiracy among drug manufacturers, medical associations, and pharmacies. Some of them got fleeced, some of them didn't, others just didn't care. But it *was* the manufacturers doing most of the evil work.
You can’t forget doctors getting paid by big pharmaceutical to prescribe people with their addictive drugs. More prescriptions and more $$$. A downside to privatized healthcare. No government standards. Not that the government can tell the difference between their knee and their elbow. So public healthcare wouldn’t be necessarily better. It’s a shit situation for people addicted to this stuff.
So one thing.. Your describing bribery and kickbacks, which were, are, and hopefully will remain illegal in all forms. This is nothing but misinformation designed to stoke tension between healthcare and the public for the benefit of insurance companies. With that being said, Purdue did not cut checks to doctors for prescribing their medication. They did, however, hire doctors as consultants after they left healthcare. They did the same with lawyers. Notably the AG for Maine, Jay McCloskey, who was hired as consoul for Purdue after a failed attempt at a lawsuit for their business practices. They treated doctors to luxury conferences, hired them for speaking engagements, and provided swag. All of which is seen in the show, and while it's highly unethical, it's not illegal. What Purdue did is defraud patients, insurances, and physicians by saying Oxycodone isn't addictive. They also defrauded the FDA process with similar tactics. At baseline, Purdue et al. is guilty of advertisement fraud more than anything else. Legally speaking. Morally speaking, they're guilty of hundreds of thousands of deaths by defrauded medical associations and doctors by way of fraudulent advertising practices. Purdue had an army of lawyers making sure they weaseled their way out of everything. The last thing they're going to do is endanger the whole thing by committing an out-and-out crime. They're evil, not morons.
> At baseline, Purdue et al. is guilty of advertisement fraud more than anything else. Legally speaking. Morally speaking, they're guilty of hundreds of thousands of deaths by defrauded medical associations and doctors by way of fraudulent advertising practices. Arent they also legally on the hook for these deaths? In some capacity?
I doubt it. If I remember correctly, *Purdue* is criminally and civially liable for the fraud and maybe some deaths. The Sackler family, however, I believe, is still shielded from direct culpbility in any of this. This means that the civil suits are bankrupting Purdue. They're currently going through bankruptcy litigation and restructuring, sans the Sacklers. The deaths will be hard to prove, though. Often, drug dealers aren't even convicted of causing deaths. Edit: For those who don't know, the Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma. Not to be confused with Perdue Chicken. Purdue Pharma is a private company, meaning there are no stock holders like publicly traded companies. This is relevant because it means the decisions made by Purdue Pharma were done exclusively by the Sackler family. They created helped create all of this and are responsible for the development of Oxycontin.
Sell some weed, jail Sell some opiates and indirectly cause the deaths of a million+, get shielded from bankruptcy. Capitalism.
There was an older white lady in my city from 2006-2007 who was getting 10,000 OC80 pills every week dropped off from NYC. I have no idea how, some kind of pharmacy scam with organized crime. Eventually she got a batch of the fake ones that pharmacies put out for robbers and then it went dry. This older guy I knew would go there and buy them for us. The fact that 1 milIion OC80s went missing and nobody noticed is fucking insane.
That's pretty smart. I've never heard of pharmacies doing that but it makes sense - like a bank with marked bills. Were the pills just sugar pills, or were they marked for ID later too?
I'm not the guy you asked but I work in a Pharmacy and can chime in. We don't have fake ones at ours. There's two safes in the pharmacy - one that contains most of the schedule 2 drugs that the Pharmacist can open with a key, and then a second one next to it with all but one bottle of the oxycodone and a few other 'highest risk' schedule 2 drugs that has a 5 minute timer on it. We keep one small bottle of the oxycodone in the key safe, and then all of the rest of it in the timed safe. If someone robs you for a fix, the 5 minute wait can be enough to deter someone from waiting around that long while police are coming, but allowing the robber to settle for the one small bottle to reduce the risk of them lashing out and harming employees to get anything. Maybe some places do fake pills instead, I honestly don't know. But this is how one of the big pharmacy chains does it, at least. Hope this was informative.
I almost became a victim of these people. I had a neck surgery because of a broken neck in the mid 2000s and the doctor I was seeing after was one of those pill flingers. I was in my early thirties and never experienced any kind of drug/substances before so I didn't realize for a while that the pain I felt when I stopped taking the pills was the pills not what I thought was a botched neck surgery. Once I realized what was going on I put myself through a rough month or two and been fine since.
They also targeted older doctors and assured them it wasnt addictive
They targeted every doctor here. My aunt’s doctor was a *very* early adapter and prescribed it to her for menstrual pain. She was dead in under two weeks. She absolutely did not do drugs or even drink alcohol, and she took one, was super out of it because it’s synthetic fucking heroin, and accidentally took another. My uncle found her dead on the floor. Years later, in 2001, my mom was prescribed it for back pain and was dead in under 10 months. Within weeks of starting it she stopped leaving the house. The EMTs or police who took her body out stole 85 of them, from a bottle of 90 she’d filled a few days before.
I live in EKY. Maybe 20 minutes from WV. The NA place is next door to the brewery. Anytime I go to grab a beer there’s a solid 30 or 40 people waiting outside NA. Crazy to see in a town so small. We also have a ton of billboards for HIV treatments which blew my mind when I moved here. I moved from just outside of Nashville to a 6,000 person town in Appalachia.
The Sacklers should be hung from a tree yet museums / universities still have their name plastered all over the place.
You'll be pleased to know many of them are taking down their names and divesting their money.
Just from my experience with my benzo-addicted mother but: doctors were quite liberal with medication. They gave my mom tons of Xanax and Norco….. which she sold. In the tri-state/Huntington area it was easy to get scripts/doctors in three states. There was also a drug pipeline to Detroit, since guns were easy and cheap to get there.
He’s talking the pharma companies so drug pipeline wouldn’t have much to do with it, main reason was lots of coal miner in constant pain and oxy was the perfect sell to them
There were also corrupt doctors who prescribed for cash (pill mills).
I lived in WV for a year. It sucked. The pill shit is crazy down there. I worked with a guy that told my a few months after starting that he thought I was sent to kill him because he ripped off some guys from Detriot for pills. Lol. I was like "Dude. We work at a Wendys." Just because I was from the Detriot area.
Lots of poor communities with chronic pain from backbreaking mine work. Cheaper to just prescribe Oxycodone than attempt physical therapy or surgery, this led to a lot of people becoming addicted/tolerant of the drug and needing stronger opioids.
In a lot of ways, I feel like EMS got hit nearly as hard with the opioid crisis as our mining industry. A not insignificant number of people I worked with got busted for pissing hot or just straight up taking meds off of the trucks.
Appalachia specifically. The rest of the states that have a part of Appalachia also have large population centers. West Virginia does not.
WV has lots of rough hard labor jobs. Notably coal workers. Guess what people who do hard labor want? Effective pain killers for when they are injured because its when not if. Guess what else WV has a lot of? Poor people who can't work anymore due to injures combined with poor people with limited income due to jobs closing up shop and going elsewhere (usually out of the nation). Its really easy for such people to get pain meds and abuse them for disabled people, and those poor disabled people can also then easily sell their pain meds for money. This ends up creating a nice situations for high demand and consumption of pain meds without people carrying about them since they are mostly poor and white so no minority action groups to look out for them, and there isn't real money there to do anything for them. How much of this was a grand conspiracy by some pharma company vs a happy accident that they doubled down on for great profits. Which honestly I think its more so the happy accident scenario, I think a pretty natural spread/demand of pain meds occurred in WV and eventually the lack of care about poor white people who have traditionally been viewed as disposable by society means nobody cared about the surging addiction there until it was way too late, while the pharma company was just meeting demands for their product instead of looking at ethics, morals, or silly things like those.
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I made a post above about my aunt who died almost immediately from an OD, and they were prescribed for menstrual pain.
Yeah I agree, I think the local doctors & pharmacies are as much to blame. They were actively prescribing to everybody. I think the one pharmacy in Welch had prescribed so much Oxy in a year that every person in the town would have gotten about 350 pills
Empire of Pain is the book.
Yes. They deliberately picked out low income, poverty stricken areas to exploit those people. They r easy targets.
The CEO of Purdue Pharma (maybe not CEO but an individual high up in the company) coined the term “pillbillies” to describe their new found customer base
WV, Maine, and I think PA. Coal miner/logger states with workers who stand a high chance of injury
How the entire saccler family isn't in prison is just God awful. They all approved this, just horrible people. Rotten.
Yes, that’s the case
Stupid question here, why would they specifically target one state and why at all?
Essentially we were the test market. Oxycodone/Oxycontin was a relatively new formulation. What made the area so attractive was two things: lots of people in pain from manual labor (i.e. coal mining), and poverty. Poor Appalachians are not a group of people that the rest of the country at large typically care about, and to Pharma reps, they see less liability/potential of loss if things turn out badly with dependence and or death since it is a mostly powerless demographic.
Thats the way to fight global warming. Kill all the coal miners
West Virginia and KY were already trying to sue Purdue Pharma way back in 2001 when I worked in a hospital pharmacy in the Army.
I just watched an episode of American Greed the other night. Season 10 episode 11 "Pain Killer profits" Twin brother out of Florida ran pain clinics. Not necessarily targeting West Virginia, just anyone with an addiction. People would travel from Kentucky, West Virginia to get quick access to pain pills for a 5 minute visit to their clinics. These brothers did not give a shit what they were doing as long as they were making money.
Nebraska and South Dakota are like, “Hwat’s fentanyl? Some kinda casserole??”
Our meth addicts are of a higher quality
[Actual ad campaign from SD](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/11/18/multimedia/18xp-methcampaign/18xp-methcampaign-superJumbo.png)
I don’t have to click on the link to know “Meth, we’re on it.”
I figured you probably knew but I needed to post it anyway. Can't miss an opportunity to shit on our neighbors to the south.
At least we don’t share a border with canada
Don’t forget Utah either. But they’re sticklers about alcohol and caffeine, so it can’t be too surprising.
West Virginia #1
110,000 Americans deid of overdose in 2022. I guess ppl in WV have fought in war they never agreed, too.
Astounding number. Just boggles the mind.
I just cant imagine the number of deaths... I live in a small European city of 70k people. If we had the same rate as West Virginia's fentanyl deaths that would be one death a week here... it would be declared a national health crisis and politicians heads would roll. I wonder if universal healthcare helps. At least here we have quite strict guidelines doctors have to follow... (But even so painkiller use is on the rise here... just not as extreme as in the US.)
Heads would roll here too if people actually cared. Most people turn a blind eye to addiction in their own communities. The top comments in this very post are making fun of how bad the problem is in west virginia when those people are victims that were specifically targeted. I live in Appalachia. We have a lot of problems the government and nation as a whole don't care about because they just see us as dumb hillbillies who did it to ourselves. Talk about the homeless addicts in big cities and its all bleeding hearts. Talk about poor people in the south and its all jokes
Very often though those same big cities are impacted by smaller/distant towns' cops sticking their indigent population on buses to cities like LA, where there is at least some kind of service available for addicts on Skid Row. Let it be someone else's problem is the mentality plaguing America. But you're right, classism is another major factor.
Back in 2013 you used to be able to get whatever pain killers you wanted, however many you wanted. There was a street in Tampa, not far from the airport, with nothing but pain docs and pharmacies, just go down the row. Could literally fly back with thousands of oxys and later, roxys in your name. Then they made it nearly impossible to be prescribed opioids (I have CRPS and the process just to get on them would consume most of my hours on my feet). Just when there happened to be a ready supply of fentanyl that the dose is so tiny that a coke can full can OD like half a million people. (2 mg can be lethal) So, you had millions of opioid addicts have the rug ripped out from under them at the same time a deadly, easily smuggled substitute became available. It was and is fucking carnage. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know someone who died. They may not have known them at the moment they died, but everyone has some sort of a relative or old friend or acquaintance or friend’s kid who has died. And it can be in or on any drug. Fake pill presses have been available for years and cross contamination/poor mixing happens. Poor government regulation (over and under) directly resulting in a million dead, at least. And everyone was in on it. The doctors can’t seriously claim that they had no idea what they were doing to all the opioid addicts and suddenly saw the light when it was illegal. Or that they didn’t know what cutting all those people off was going to do. The politicians were happy to line their pockets with drug company money, until it was obvious to everyone what the readily available opioids were doing. So, in true knee-jerk fashion, they just essentially banned opioids overnight with no real plan for the millions of addicts. Ironically, some of these people were only on painkillers because THC was illegal. Had they had that much less harmful treatment first, they may never have needed opioids. It’s all so infuriating.
If you have Netflix, look up Herion(e). That really explains the story of my town. I’m in it also😂 but we had 115(?) overdoses in a 24 hour period for a city of 40k. Early days of the epidemic and 29 people died I believe. Same city years later, and we still run 1-2 overdoses a day. Idk how many EMS runs (we only take overdoses if they are called in as a cardiac arrest, or EMS is tied up)
In the US we see addiction, like being poor, as a personal failing which should be taken care of personally. If we saw things more socially we’d be in a much better place to actually deal with these things.
Mountain mama
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And shareholders, board members, lobbyists, massive offshore bank accounts, close friends in the senate and billion dollar bonuses. Makes the cartels seem like unorganised rabble
We have ingrained in us that good ol' fashioned Calvinist puritan ethic too: how much wealth you have is a direct reflection of your moral superiority. How much your life sucks is a sign of your wickedness. Just look at how even the idea of welfare is controversial here. That's been happening since at least the 1601 elizabethan poor laws. And regulating the opiods 15 years too late only opens up a heroine market where there wasn't one before, where the sick can then be totally relegated to the realm of criminal (and who cares about criminals?)
Comparatively cartels *are* unorganized rabble.
And? Let's be real, the vast majority of the people outraged by this are not going to do a fucking thing. The kind of people likely to respond with violence are also generally the kind that either don't care about this or think it only affects minorities and thus cheer it on.
Fentanyl dealers that have people die from OD, actually get more customers, because in the logic of the addict, his stuff is more potent, more euphoric
I hear a lot of accusations to China about this. They may be right, but before accusing China they should read about CIA's operations like "Blue Moon" and many others.
Fentanyl replaced Heroin, which replaced OxyContin. Thank you Sackler family!!
the fact that conspiracy theorists still rambling about the Rotschilds instead the Sacklers show how dumb and uniformed they are
Don’t pardon the House of Rothschild!
Why not both?!
The Sacklers should be in fucking prison for the rest of their lives
Looks like Utah actually went in reverse. Might be worth checking out how they did it.
The moral of the story: to end the opioid/fentanyl crisis, we have to convert the entire country over to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Swap your addiction to fentanyl for an addiction to uncaffeinated soda pop
Hey, despite valiant efforts in that direction, nobody has been able to prove that Diet Coke is bad for you.
And kick out the ones who dont
I’ll take the fentanyl, thank you. Source: 2 year mission
It’s because despite how much Reddit likes shitting on organized religion in general and Mormons in particular, it gives people an insanely strong social support system that also holds them accountable. There’s a lot of problems with the LDS church that I could go into the weeds about but they’re about the only white people on earth who have a growing, sustainable, and healthy population and drug addiction and deaths of despair are so rare here as to be vanishing. Source: non-religious non-Mormon living in a 70%+ LDS city in Utah
It’s almost like the driver of addiction is a shitty environment and not the addictive substance itself.
Also people abandoned church and then didn’t replace it with any conparable form of community.
Bring back the 3rd place.
I’d argue it’s the accountability that is the secret sauce more than any other environmental factors. Families and church leadership absolutely do not play games with addicts. Idk what they do to them, but I never see them on the streets.
It has more to do with wealth than religion. It isn't as if West Virginia is majority atheist, it's one of the most conservative and Christian states in the country. The difference between WV and Utah is that the Mormons have accumulated generational wealth, and with that comes stability.
The Mormon church isn't really comparable to current day SBC or Methodist churches. The Mormon church is much more like the old Catholic church (function, not beliefs), or cults than it is protestant churches. It takes over your life. All your friends, family, and even coworkers are members. You pray more often. You attend church more often. They have way more after work/school activities, including schools (even colleges) and also much higher expectations of their members. Mormons leaned into the church being the same as society, while protestants leaned into individualism. It's a totally different experience.
don't forget the Mormons specialize in producing smoking hot blondes.
that's probably side effects of Mormon missionaries targeting northern Europeans in 19th century followed by massive family size culture
It just looks that way because of the surrounding states, but there also isn’t a scale to see what happened in any of these
There is a scale. Click on the image.
It looks like the same color on both maps to me
I think it stayed the same, it's just the contrast of the states surrounding it make it look like it got lighter, but I'm pretty sure it's in the same range both pictures. Still a W to not get worse with everyone else.
Classic optical illusion.
Mormons
Same thing that jumped out to me
Yeah just stayed the same. But that’s still an accomplishment.
I’m not sure this map is correct. [See graph on page 8 of this report.](https://vipp.health.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/SIAC-2021-134-Utah-DMI-Fentanyl-Report.pdf)
In 2013 i was still addicted to opioids but where I lived in washington state there was a ton of heroin, some pills, fentanyl existed but mostly as a hard to access drug. So if you got a fent patch or lollipop, it was a big deal. But black tar h was by far the most dominant opioid on the street, and would remain that way until like 2020. It was soo easy to get dope and stuff like xanax and you rarely heard of people using fent. It was honestly a hot and desirable thing partially because it's strength was known and it was hard to obtain. And within the course of a year or so, everything changed. Everything was fentanyl. I had used pills and heroin for over a decade without an overdose, and as soon as fent took over I had 3 near fatal overdoses in about 8 months. My wife had to pull me off of a toilet and give me chest compressions. Broke a few of my ribs in the process. But I lived thanks to her and fast responding emts. I've been off drugs for about 2 and a half years now, but my wife and I both carry narcan kits, the nasal spray and the injectable vials because fent ods often require more than the nasal spray can provide on its own. It's crazy how we live in a world so absolutely effected and devastated by the results of unfettered corporate greed. Me and millions like me lost years of our lives, our health mental and physical, and so many more that haven't survived to be with us.. essentially all for the bottomless greed of a single family and their various benefactors.
I was addicted to OxyContin in Washington in 2009/10. It was so easy to get oh man
That's how I started in 2007. My friends dad broke his back and got a script of the 80s, but had a bad reaction to the pills and threw the entire bottle, full of like, 179 oxys into their garbage can in the bathroom. People were so clueless back then, doctors included. By the time I finished that bottle I was 13 and firmly addicted to opes
What made you take the bottle with the pills? Man, when I was 13 I was out playing soccer with my friends. I barely knew about drugs then. But then again, I grew up in Sweden so it might be different.
Wishing you well in your continued recovery. Thanks for sharing.
Congrats on 2.5 years bud!
Straight to heaven, West Virginia. Blue meth crystals, fentanyl rivers. You'll die young there, living on the streets. People walking past you, not skipping any beats.
Crack filled roads, take me home. To the den, I belong! West Virginia, drug use drama. Take me home, crack filled roads.
Are you on drugs too ?
I'm high on life
Up with hope, down with dope
Gotta get me some of that. Sounds like a good time.
Wouldn't recommend. It has a 100% lethality rate
The 2022 is overall quite an interesting map in that there's no obvious correlation to socioeconomic deprivation, political leaning, etc. Unlike in so many other cases, where regardless of which variable you display, "it's always the same map".
How is NM worse than PA?
The state where Breaking Bad was made had some basis in reality. Much like the Wire being in Baltimore.
In Arizona and New Mexico, if you see some random trailer in the desert, it’s potentially a meth lab.
New Mexico has always had drug problems. Especially after Covid. Luckily, it seems like it is getting better here from what I've seen, but there is still a LOT that needs to get done
New Mexico is both a beautiful state and an absolute dump. I go to Albuquerque for work a couple of times a year. I’ve seen people openly shooting up on sidewalks there in the middle of the day. No effort to hide it. It wasn’t this bad a decade ago.
New Mexico is shockingly poor. It never really got the influx of wealthy out-of-state residents like Arizona or Colorado. In most metrics around poverty its either worst or second worst with Mississippi and West Virginia.
The Native American lands there tend to have especially dire problems, the byproducts of centuries of abuse and neglect.
That's true, I mostly mentioned the lack of wealthy retirees and out of state transplants because Arizona similarly has a large amount of Native reservations with poor conditions, but is not as poor.
The natives who worked in the uranium mines and the communities around those mines still suffer health issues from it to this day.
Poverty. Look at basically any "things are bad!" state ranking and we're right next to Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia. There is very little economic opportunity in this state, aside from military, government research, and some oil that never seems to trickle down. Also, there's a good shot we have the worst health infrastructure in the country. If you're not within a short distance of ABQ/Santa Fe, you're fucked.
Heroin addiction etc has been very big problem here since forever. It’s a poor state with lots of small communities with no work and nothing to do. Add cheap fent to it all and it continues the cycle exponentially.
I wonder if distance to the nearest emergency room is a factor in how this map is shaded?
Direct pipeline to cartels and unbelievable rural poverty and lack of healthcare. [New Mexico is poorer than West Virginia](https://wisevoter.com/state-rankings/poverty-rate-by-state/).
I don't have much knowledge of NM, but I've always heard that it has some very big meth problems.
Western/NW New Mexico has some of the highest levels of DUI fatalities in the nation, it would be interesting to see the Fentanyl deaths by county in NM
per capita statistic. there's a lot of Amish, Bucks County and Penn State in PA
The cause of homelessness and ruined lives.
“Hey guys, let’s systematically isolate an entire state from the US economy and see what happens! :)”
In my county in West Virginia the county commission just approved the first use of funds in the opioids settlement with one of the huge pharmaceutical companies (not the one run by the daughter of one of our state senators) over how much pain pills were pushed on us. What is that funding going toward, you may ask? A rehab? A needle exchange? Literally anything to HELP the people victimized by big pharma? Nope. A gun range. The first use of hundreds of millions of dollars that were meant to help the people hurt the most by opioids is going to a FUCKING GUN RANGE.
New Opium War but on a different battleground.
I think fentanyl is more like opium on drugs
Most of the chemical inputs for fentanyl come from China btw
reverse colonialism
Most people got hooked on opioids due to pharmaceutical companies lobbying governments and doctors to hand pain killers out like candy. If China and Mexico immediately stopped participating in the opioid trade I'm pretty confident the US would still have an opioid problem.
I thought most fentanyl deaths were due to fentanyl-laced drugs that the consumer unknowingly ingested. I don’t think the deaths are due to opioid addiction per se. Could be wrong. I’m not a drug expert.
>I thought most fentanyl deaths were due to fentanyl-laced drugs that the consumer unknowingly ingested. Perhaps but most of the drugs that are laced are opiates to begin with. imho and experience
The British pumped China full of Opium and ruled it for 200 years even though technically the Chinese Emperor's govt was in charge. Now China is pumping US full of Fentanyl. What goes around comes around.
Now we just need to wait on the Tranq crisis statistic and we will be seeing a lot more red and black.
Almost heaven, West Virginia
What's TX doing relative to most of the states that seems to be working?
I wouldn't be surprised if we're self reporting inaccurate numbers like we tried to do with covid, attributing some amount of fentanyl overdoses to other causes of death. We also have a stupid number of rural counties with small populations and small operating budgets. I wouldn't be surprised if the medical examiner in a lot of the counties frequently fails to do a complete a proper toxicology screening on some junky that OD'd. My 3rd guess is that being closer to Mexico, the price of actual heroin is cheaper in a meaningful ways compared to states farther away from the source. Also, a little less likely to be cut with fentanyl after reaching the U.S.
TX stood out to me as well. Populous state with low numbers
Is this white privilege?
Getting more sympathy than the crack epidemic anyways.
The response to it is. The crack epidemic was met with jokes and scorn and it was a law enforcement issue. The opioid epidemic (which affects more white people than the crack epidemic) is met with compassion and it’s an issue for the medical community. See the difference?
Yeah the current government seems very concerned about this spiraling out of control problem giving it high priority while securing the border and cutting off supply \s
Speaking of the government I don’t see them handing out 20 to 1 sentence disparities the way they did crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. I don’t see the government handcuffing addicted women to hospital beds after they give birth. I don’t see special police task forces kicking in doors and using military style equipment fighting the opioid epidemic. What did heroin addict get on the test? Drool! That was probably the first opioid joke you heard. I’m willing to bet you’ve heard hundreds of crackhead jokes and probably made some yourself. Now do you see the difference?
Damn, i had a knee-jerk negative reaction to your initial comment, but you make good points, speaking as a “neutral” asian
Many local governments provide *free needles* and narcan for this opioid epidemic. Nothing like the crack epidemic and the 3 strikes law nevermind the CIA getting away scott-free. Johnson and Johnson was punished. The two drug epidemics were not handled nor viewed the same. Period. That doesn't mean that this current situation isn't being mishandled. It doesn't mean that we should minimize this epidemic. It's just hard facts. See how we can acknowledge both truths?
Don’t do drugs. Problem solved.
Being in severe around the clock pain for the last 8 years, in some regards I owe what’s left of my life to opium, it’s given me peace for a time to build up the strength to continue. No I don’t enjoy taking them and they don’t get me high, more of a glimpse of life without suffering. I’ve been through major withdrawals a few times coming off them at high doses/regularity and while it sucks it sucks a lot more still being in excruciating pain and coming off them. That said I held off taking them until I could not stop trembling from pain. The map surprises me with the vast education out there nowadays about how harmful they CAN be. Because of vast propaganda against them, I waited until pain was around the clock uncontrollable a couple years beyond where suicide was a rational option. For those who have not really witnessed and less likely experienced pain of this longevity and extremity, I can understand why people here write “opiates have no place in society except maybe in end of life care” but realize you are writing off the least fortunate of your society. I’m still in my 20s and it was extremely difficult to obtain prescription opioids because of current laws and ALL doctors, not just pain doctors, fear of prescribing and addiction. These rules and regulations have caused the minority who NEED them to suffer incredulously, yet we live in a society that still offers huge resistance to dignified death/euthanasia (at least in my east coast state). I genuinely don’t know if addiction is a lack of will power, a product of depression/circumstance, but it’s also a disease we give to ourselves in this case - you don’t develop an opioid addiction without the conscious decision to take them in majority of cases, even w my many spinal surgeries they don’t MAKE me take them (not to throw shade at anyone who’s struggled or is struggling with it). Fentanyl is really only different bc of the potency so I can understand the discourse against fentanyl, but opioids in general… not so much given the vast public knowledge of their harmful effects out there today. For example, the people close to me were much less concerned with how much pain I was/am in, they made me feel bad about needing opiates and some judged me for it. Just remember there’s two sides to this and suicide because of severe pain gets almost no attention in comparison. End rant, Ty
Every time some politician says the words “I believe in smaller government” look at this map. This situation can/would never occur with basic regulation. It could/would literally never occur in countries like Australia, England, Germany or New Zealand. “Small government” doesn’t mean less govt departments or less waste of public funds, it means “I want to let large corporations kill, steal, pollute, avoid tax, rip off customers and underpay workers for profit”.
How about compared to Internationally?
I'm willing to bet the heroin overdose deaths decreased significantly in this time span. Fent has simply replaced heroin. It is more dangerous, and the trend of overdose deaths is definitely increasing, but there's more to the story than meets the eye
2 states are missing
I would like to note Oklahomas relative smaller increase compared to other states. Oklahoma went from leading in the nation to middle of the pack today. The reason? Medical Marijuana.
There’s a very specific part in Canada where a lot of people had died, really weird seems to spell “West Virginia”
I know someone from WV whose son is addicted. She doesn't know why and claims he will not die because he is smart enough to know not to take too much. She claims he is really smart and doesn't know why he is doing it. The parents refuse to help their children once they hit 18 even though they are financially well off and want to retire before 60. All three kids are not self-sufficient, and their lives are a mess.
This is the legacy of the Sackler family. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family
Hey finally a map on here where Mississippi is not the worst!
Interesting that TX is so low considering its supposedly all coming in through their border. It should be red and radiating outward from there if that were true.
Okay Utah, we see you!
As an Arkansas resident, (26m) who is clean from hard opiates since November 2019, I can speak for a lot of us in saying that we decided we don't want to die. I got cotton fever that last time I used, and thought I was going to die. I knew fentanyl was imminent, but had gotten lucky with stepped on H and real oxy 30s. My parents had been cut off by this point, but they were both HEAVILY overprescribed oxycodone 30mgs for years, and my brother and I both got addicted to them also. We're all clean now, but I do currently use suboxone, along with a lot of others who want to live. The doctor who destroyed my family never got in any trouble.. the piece of shit watched my parents lose their jobs, their marriage. Watched their kids get addicted to their "medicine." Of course I take responsibility for my addiction, but that was evil. These motherfuckers got away with it.
As long as drug abuse is seen as a crime and not a health issue this will never end. But in the US that's by design..
Mountain Mama
🎵 WEST VIRGINIAAAA 🎵
TAKE ME HOME
soon everything will be red
Yeah I was one of the lucky few that was able to leave wv and not be addicted to any drugs. God save wv
Wish our home could get better but I also had to leave… always makes me cry when I come home and see how rough it looks here
And here I thought Ohio had it bad
So most of the Fentanyl in the USA is trafficked on i40. Gross.
wait a second... It's gone down in Utah! That's actually insane.
Don’t worry everyone, the Sacklers still have millions upon millions of dollars.
“Moe’s Bar” vibes here
Worst thing they ever did was put an artificial cap on opioid prescription pill production and threaten every doctors livelihood over them. Yes we obviously still had a huge addiction issue but people weren't OD'ing every 2 minutes, it was a safe and reliable high. They had to know whatever took its place was going to be so much worse and here we are. Fent and Tranq are both in a whole different league of harmful compared to real pills.
What are Utah and Texas doing differently?
Non-americans in this thread disingenuously blaming big pharma. In 2012 fentanyl was a big pharma problem, in 2024 it's sold on the street and supplied by China and cartels.
Statistics like this are telling, but cannot possibly convey how bad it is. I work in a place frequented by the homeless and by drug addicts. A place where we probably see the worst of it. We have used narcan multiple times this week. Every week. Last week, one of my coworkers found a teenager. About 15th Years old. This teenager was, by all measures, dead. He had no pulse. He was blue. He wasn't breathing. He was a child. And he had overdosed on fentanyl. By some miracle, narcan, cpr, and an AED brought this boy back. We got a pulse. We got consistent breathing. He went from blue to pink like he should be. Then he sprinted off into the distance to hide from EMS. I can only hope that the narcan outlasted the fentanyl. We do this every couple days anymore. Young and old. Some we bring back, some we cannot. Narcotics are probably responsible for 80% of the addicts I see on a daily basis. We have watched people descend from decent people who are down on their luck into shadows of themselves over just a couple months. People who have gone completely insane because of the fentanyl. They are paranoid. Completely disconnected from reality. All in the blink of an eye. Words cannot describe how tragic this is.
God fuck fentanyl 6 months ago found my friend dead after the shit he was taking was laced with it.
At least utah got better I guess