How the US turned the tide on drug overdose deaths
How the US turned the tide on drug overdose deaths
Drug overdose deaths fell by 27,000 in the year leading to September 2024, signaling that the opioid epidemic may finally be receding.
“Some people are just bad” is a core conservative belief. They don’t believe in harm reduction for drug addicts. In fact they want the harm to happen, and ideally for it to be fatal. Because these people are bad, so let’s get rid of them.
They have the same mentality about criminal justice. Some people are just bad - criminals. Give them the death penalty. They don’t want to talk about rehabilitation or small improvements to the recidivism rate. Some people are just bad, they think, so lock em up and throw away the key.
Of course, most conservatives have either done drugs or committed a crime, but the whole “some people are just bad” concept never applies to themselves in their own minds. Because some people are just good too, and doing bad things doesn’t change that.
So, conveniently, they themselves can get away with any kind of wrongdoing, forever. But a single transgression by another person is a good justification to simply end their fucking life.
It’s such hypocritical, violent, hateful mentality. Humans have succeeded as a species by coming together and looking after one another. This mentality is positively inhuman.
If it’s a family member or loved one who commits a crime, they’re “misguided” or “have a good heart”.
I worked for a medium sized refrigeration contractor company. The owner's son was a massive opiate and coke addict and kept stealing equipment, embezzling and had no less than 2 ODs on company property.
The second time I was tasked to bring him his new phone in the hospital as he had sold his original one for the drugs he overdosed on.
I sat there and synched it up to his SIM and got to watch all the texts from his family pour in
All about 'our little druggie boy' and wishing him quick recovery and the most gentle and humorous of chiding
Two weeks before they had fired my friend, a single father, for testing positive for weed
Guess who the owner voted for
I’ve had people (family) argue that drug use increases crime, and by providing things like safe injection sites or narcan you’re encouraging more drug use and inviting more crime by removing the consequences.
Oversimplified foolishness isn’t really what I’d call a core conservative value. It’s more just the way they roll. They roll based on their gut feelings 99.9% of the time.
“Some people are just bad…”
But it’s never themselves just wanting addicts to die, breaking up immigrant families, breaking up or preventing lgbtq rights, or wanting to enact violence on anyone who disagrees with them.
Because these people are bad, so let’s get rid of them.
Rush Limbaugh was an addict, I'd at least like to have gotten rid of him off the airwaves when his habit got out of hand (circa turn of the century...)
For a long time he topped my list of people I’d love to get rid of. Just not because of his addiction.
this is very well put! thanks for saying it so succinctly
Going back to Reagan's presidency, when he encouraged the spread of AIDS, and discouraged any research. The general thought was that it was spread behaviorally, so all they had to do to end AIDS, was stop the behavior (gay sex).
Exactly. To these people, being ‘bad’ isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. (You may thank certain types of Christianity for this nonsense.)
So the thinking goes something like: ‘I’m a Good Person. And as a Good Person, I do Good Things and have Good Family, because I am Good.’ They feel (and it is always feel, not think) that Bad People are what cause the true downfall of society—mostly because they’re told that by their Good Authority Figures (you can tell the Authority Figures are Good because they lead/belong to a Church, and Churches are Good—as long as it’s the right church, of course).
This all means, of course, that since they’re Good, they can’t do Bad Things; they just make occasional mistakes.
(This is also where you get ‘The people I voted for are Good, because only a Bad Person would vote for Bad People, and I’m not Bad, I’m Good. So Trump isn’t Bad, he’s just misunderstood!’ nonsense.)
And, I hate to break it to you, but this behavior is very human. This is a version of Tribalism; my In Group is Good and everyone in the Out Group is Bad.
Edit: I think Sir Terry Pratchett said it best:
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
Yes in group / out group is pretty universal. It doesn’t necessarily rule the day for everyone all the time, but it’s inside each of us.
Adding to the things other awesome people have said on this, I’ll add the lyrics from David Bowie’s song God Knows I’m Good.
It’s about a poor woman who shoplifts some meat, thinking “god knows I’m good - god may look the other way today.”
And later when she’s caught and led away by the authorities, she thinks “god knows I’m good - surely god won’t look the other way!”
Epic takedown of in-group mentality and religious hypocrisy at once.
Meanwhile trump is trying to just kill easy access to Narcan to save people.
So I'm sure in a few years we'll see numbers climb again.
All drugs should be legal
I mean it didn’t seem to work out for Portland; maybe in a perfect world but in a world full of stresses and homelessness it seems like it might hurt people who get addicted and exploited. But would be fine legalizing weed and shrooms.
You're right, it didn't work for Portland - but things that were promised were never delivered. Other states took it as an invitation to send their problems out of state, which of course is unsustainable.
Lots more factors that doomed it to never really have a chance.