
The True Cause of the Opioid Epidemic - pseudolus
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/01/what-caused-opioid-epidemic/604330/
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mcguire
" _Her interviewees had easy access to opioids, yes, but they also felt
betrayed by the world. When Silva presented her work recently, an economist
told her, “This is, like, an everything problem.”_

" _“I thought that was a really smart way of putting it,” she told me. Indeed,
in one of their studies, the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton,
who coined the “deaths of despair” hypothesis, noted that opioid overdoses,
suicides, and alcohol abuse are the results of “cumulative distress,” or the
overall “failure of life to turn out as expected.”_

" _The solutions to this “everything problem” are not clear. Silva told me
that the opioid epidemic had made some of her interviewees even more
resentful, because they saw their neighbors as too weak to pull themselves out
of addiction. At times, they seemed to almost celebrate the pain of withdrawal
from opioids, as a necessary way of toughening up. “They actually end up
supporting programs that would give people less help or less aid, because they
feel like it’s enabling to keep giving help to people who refuse to get
better,” she told me._

" _One of Silva’s interviewees tried to convince her that stress is how people
grow. But stress can also make people hurt._

