After watching a 30 year old female overdose in a parking lot and not being able to be saved by first responders or emergency responders I've realized this problem is far more prevalent then most of us realize. This is a epidemic that is playing out under our very noses all across America.
This is just as dangerous as terrorists or any other think that goes bump in the night - it will destroy this country if not stopped.
Not sure what the solution is but this looks to be a good start to push for controls needed.
There were less than 150 terrorist deaths in the US this decade [1] and tens of thousands of opioid deaths every year in the US [2]. Terrorism is closer to the threat posed by crush deaths from vending machines [3].
> An attack with e.g. a biological weapon could cause, on a single day, 1000x the cumulative number of deaths we had over the past decade.
Perhaps. But it's virtually a certainty that opioid overdoses will kill tens of thousands of people in the US this year. (The most reliable recent figure I can find was ~30k in 2015.) Meanwhile, a terrorist attack in the US that kills hundreds of people -- let alone tens of thousands -- is a relatively low-probability event...
You'd need quite a lot of biological weapons. 1000 x 100 terrorism deaths is still on the order of magnitude of the number of road deaths in 10 years. So a 100,000 people killing bomb in the US every few decades isn't really that bad.
That seems like a veiled sort of victim-blaming to me. The entire premise that "someone abusing opioids doesn't infringe on another's freedom" ignores the role of the medical system (and of the drug companies named in this lawsuit!) in leading patients into opiate addiction through poorly handled pain management.
Moreover, addiction is fundamentally a disease which acts upon the sufferer's ability to make free, rational decisions. In a very real sense, the addiction itself is "infringing on the freedom" of the addict, even if it hasn't killed them yet.
Unless you are injected against your will or force fed then you still had the freedom to not take it in the first place. Everyone knows how addicting these things are. There are alternative pain relieving options available too. Nobody cares about smokers getting addicted although they do care about public smoking because it infringes on their right to clean air.
No, the point of the lawsuit is that they don't (or didn't). The article makes that clear through quotes such as: "We believe that the evidence will show that these pharmaceutical companies purposely misled doctors about the dangers connected with pain meds that they produced."
> Nobody cares about smokers getting addicted although they do care about public smoking because it infringes on their right to clean air.
You make a good point. Surely there's a way statistics account for this "damage potential". How do statistics treat things like nuclear incidents, etc?
Apart from writing difference of books and publishing hundreds of papers on the subject (see Nassim Talib), the tl;dr is economists and sociologists still really have no way of truly accounting for them besides being cognizant of their existence.
Good to reference Black Swan, but Taleb would call these events gray swans, not black swans.
A true black swan is something that's basically inconceivable before it occurs. It is outside the mental model used to evaluate outcome probabilities. Black swan events include things like:
---Your enemy in a war invents the nuclear bomb and drops it on your cities (this happened to Japan in 1945)
---You are a turkey. The farmer comes, as he does every day. Instead of feeding you, he slaughters you (something which you've got no experience or conception of).
---It's 1994 and you own Blockbuster Video, a solid earning company. Then someone invents the Internet...
Biological warfare attacks are quite well-known as a concept, making them gray swans. Also in the gray swan category are asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes, etc etc.
I try to spread this distinction because if we start calling gray swans black swans, that will hide from us the most important part of Taleb's argument, which is that true black swans are the most important events. The idea of the black swan is hard to keep in your mind (how do you keep in mind the inconceivable?) so it's very easy for a pretender concept to sneak in and steal the label.
In that case the cause of the credit crunch that the 2007 financial crisis was a grey swan. The risk models on subprimereal estate were clearly being interrupted incorrectly...
Nukes have also been a very well-known concept, then have been theoretically invented in 1939 and by 1941, it was well-proven that one can be made. If anything in nukes was a black swan event it was the isotope mix of reactor-produced plutonium which made detonation of plutonium bomb without a fizzle incredibly difficult - something which no one had an idea before it happened and it almost doomed the project - in 1941, making the bomb looked a lot easier than it proved to be.
It was also well-known that U.S. is the world leading scientific and industrial power, that it absorbed huge number of well-educated Jews fleeing Nazis, and it was least affected by ongoing WWII of all major powers.
So if anyone was to make a bomb it was U.S., every rational actor should have expected it to happen. Only 'if' was timing.
I think the big black-swan event with nukes was dropping one on a city. It's a pretty big mental leap from "Yes, nuclear fission is possible" to "Our enemies have achieved it in practice, turned it into a weapon, and are about to drop it on one of our cities." Even among the top physicists working on the Manhattan project, it was uncertain if detonating the bomb would ignite the whole atmosphere and kill off all life on earth.
Wormholes, for example, have been theorized for decades. Nevertheless, "The earth is about to fall into a wormhole and end up in another dimension" would probably fall into the category of black-swan events.
> it was uncertain if detonating the bomb would ignite the whole atmosphere and kill off all life on earth.
This was known before it was dropped on a city. The Trinity test happened about three weeks prior to dropping the first bomb on Japan. The second bomb was dropped with full knowledge of the potential casualties after the devastation of the first.
We Americans always justify these bombs, but really, there is no justification.
You presume that a beach landing was necessary. By this point in the war, the US had air superiority (the fire bombing of Tokyo...), and all sea lanes under control. The US had other options.
The best explanation for why the US wanted to have a swift end to the war with Japan was to deny the USSR the option of dividing Japan like was Germany.
There is no good way to justify killing civilians during the war, and it's impossible to say what would have happened if these bombs were not dropped and some other path was taken.
From a purely strategic perspective, the potential to avoid a costly land invasion must have seemed much more tangible than the at the time hypothetical and uncertain PR fallout (no pun intended) that would result from use of the new weapon.
Arguably keeping the USSR out of the islands may well have caused less misery over time for the Japanese people, from the purely utilitarian perspective of looking at how populations under Soviet rule fared.
It really wasn't a black swan though because bombings of industrial cities were well established at that point; it is even possible that the bombing of Tokyo killed as many as the two atomic bombs combined (estimates of deaths for each have very broad ranges).
Earlier than that on the European front, there was Dresden, which killed about a third of as many that as the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
Really, once the US established control of the air, they were capable of wiping out Japan's cities with conventional weapons.
The number of deaths can be both meaningful and irrelevant. For example, we can drop 1 regular bomb that kills 10000, or we can drop this new type of bomb that slowly eats the flesh off of 100 people, before they die very terribly (and unstoppably) a week later.
The second, just by its gruesomeness factor remains a black swan, irrespective of the number of deaths.
In the same vein the nuke might not be as deadly as all the bombings before it, but at the same time it was one new weapon (ie. a singular drop from a single plane) that did something totally new and horrific, thereby making it a black swan.
I actually took an entire class in business school about this exact topic -- "Catastrophic Risk Analysis". Great class, the teacher was a former astronaut (among many other things).
And you're right, you basically can't predict things like this -- but a great many catastrophic risks that can be prevented are ignored because the event seems much less likely than it is due to the scale of the impact being so large as to be unimaginable by many. Climate change is a chief example; but there are plenty others throughout history in business, warfare, and science.
No way to predict, sure. But if my memory serves me correctly, the entire theme of Taleb's Black Swan was about accounting for such events. For example, financial hedging; you won't know what event might manifest itself and cause a huge financial disruption (the cause), but you can anticipate "it" happening, in some form, and preparing for it by buying long shot hedges (accounting for the effect).
My understanding is that you multiply the cost by the probability, or use a power of the cost (since the impact of a huge liability or disabling disaster is usually more than the accounted-for direct damage).
Problem is that it's virtually impossible to estimate the probability of a black-swan event, since, by definition, they are events that have never happened before and nobody has foreseen them possibly happening. A priori, your probability is zero, and yet they happen anyway.
We can be fairly certain that something unexpected will happen in the future, but predicting what that something is or with what likelihood it will occur is still the domain of fortune-tellers.
Do we do that for various financial endeavors and shut them down due to the economic risk posed? Cost of 9/11 was rather large, but it was not that large simply due to terrorism, it was that large due to the failure of various measures meant to prevent it... all aligning into a perfect storm.
And therein lies the problem. How do you calculate the probability in the first place? For some things (asteroids) this is possible, for others (catastrophic rapid climate change or terrorism) we don't have the predictive tools.
Large-scale, high-consequence, strongly systemic or correlated events are difficult to model and describe.
Death-by-asteroid is one of the more interesting cases. That would be a bad day for you (or your descendants), but also, quite likely, many others, when it happens. The days aren't frequent, but they're big.
I think the OP means black swans happen. And so terrorism should be considered a black swan sort of risk. But if we're doing that then shut down all the various financial institutions that may cause such risk as they have been shown to do more than once in the past. However, thus far the black swan risk from terrorism seems to be a few thousand people in the time frame of around two to three decades... globally. The cost seems to be in the trillions but that has little to do with the terrorists, and much to do with the management of the response to terror... and also management of the risk posed by it.
Globally? No, that's a very USA-centric view. Terrorism has killed hundreds of people globally this month alone. It has destabilized (if not outright destroyed) many countries over the past 2-3 decades.
Terrorism has not destroyed countries across the past 2-3 decades.
Civil wars did. Many of them have either been started by, or fueled by American foreign policy.
So, yes, your country being destabilized by a civil war is a real threat if you live in the global south. In America? It's not going to happen because of a few mouthbreathers decided to cook some bathtub C4.
Yeah it has killed hundreds this month mostly again due to mismanagement of response to terror and management of the prep for terror. It's a significantly different thing to compare terrorism in 3rd world countries who are routinely targets of both non-State and State sponsored terror because lack of control mechanisms and terror in developed countries or countries with stable governance systems.
This is a good point. The annual stats for terrorism looked very different in 2001 vs 2000. And the nature of terrorism presents an unknown level of threat that could make the events of 2001 look like a firecracker in comparison. Your biological weapon example is excellent, there are those who have the will and only lack the way to make it happen today.
As an average citizen I bunch events into the categories of 1 "Things I Can Prevent" and 2 "Things I Cannot Prevent". Opioids fall into category 1. I refuse to take any opioids even when prescribed because I do not want to go near such dangerous substances. However terrorist attacks, mass shootings, crazy people, etc fall into category 2. Category 2 frightens me quite a bit more than category 1. I'm willing to bet that a ton of people feel the same way as me. And that's probably why issues like terrorism get a ton of air time and issues like opioids get very little.
Many people who end up taking opioids say the same thing you say, and swear them off. It's easy to say that you won't take them until you're in pain that makes you feel as if you're dying, then it's a different story.
Source? From what I have read the major cause of the opioid crisis is doctors prescribing opioids for pain [0]. Even 2 week prescriptions have 25% chance of creating an addict [1]. Remember originally these were marketed to doctors as non-addictive.
Opoid issues get quite a bit of press in midwestern newspapers. In my experience it gets more press than terrorism.
How can you prevent crazy people?
I'm asking because I often wonder what price we're willing to pay to make to make the chances of killed by another person 0%. Is there anyway to acheive that without creating a police state with zero privacy and zero possibility of dissent? If we start editing people's genes so they aren't "crazy" who decides what the legalized normative behaviour is?
I'm not sure labeling as "crazy" is fair or helpful. These substances are addictive and many people got them prescribed by their doctor whom they trusted.
Lab experiments with rats might be pointing is towards what we have to do to mitigate this at least somewhat. Experiments showed that rats in a healthy social environment are much less prone to opioid addiction than ones living in isolation or having lived in isolation. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park. I finds it easy to imagine that the same is true to some degree for humans. I wouldn't be surprised if the effect was even stronger on humans. We are very social animals after all.
> I'm not sure labeling as "crazy" is fair or helpful. These substances are addictive and many people got them prescribed by their doctor whom they trusted.
I'm pretty sure the person you're replying to was using the word "crazy" in reference to terrorists, specifically the ones of a suicide variety, not your garden variety person who ends up addicted to prescription drugs.
Whoops. I was only using the word crazy as a quote from the person I was responding too. I think the word crazy only exists in a perjorative sense and is used to do discredit a set of individuals.
In your hypothetical example where personality editing is possible, the consequences would be much more wide-ranging. Much of human suffering is due to human shortcomings and weaknesses. Therefore, if it becomes possible to edit minds, the incentive to make everyone resilient, jovial, agreeable, patient, extroverted... etc. would be strong enough that a natural normative standard would put itself into place by the action of market forces.
Having a diverse set of personalities helps society but every parent would want to give their kid the traits most conducive to fitting in and being happy.
Personally I feel the majority of road accidents fall into category 1. As long as you are very careful and aware of your surroundings you can avoid a huge number of accidents. This is probably why experienced drivers get huge discounts on car insurance. I've managed to actively avoid many more accidents than I have been involved in and I've never caused an accident (beyond giving a car a scrape while parking just after getting my permit). Sometimes there's no winning though. Like waiting at a stop sign and someone rear ends the truck behind you (so you can't see anything behind the large truck) hard enough to send the truck into your car and almost send you into speeding cross traffic. When that happened it really freaked me out. That was definitely a category 2 event.
If you don't need a lot of space, i.e. you don't have kids and you can handle having roommates, then it doesn't really cost more to live in a big city. Sure, the rent is more, but not having to pay for an auto loan/gasoline/insurance saves a good amount too.
Source: I moved from the suburbs of DC in MD to Manhattan, I track my spending pretty religiously on Mint, and my spending only went up a few $K per year -- which is way, way less than my salary did from the move.
I work on Manhattan and live in Brooklyn, with family and kids. I still reap most of the benefits of a dense city (subway, nearly everything within walking distance, variety of options in food, etc), while spending < 20% of my income on rent.
I'm sure you already know, but it's completely irrational to fear the things out of your control. There's literally nothing to be accomplished by doing so.
> it's completely irrational to fear the things out of your control.
Fear is the foreknowledge of (or of the risk of) something unpleasant happening to you. Foreknowledge of our inevitable death, over which we have no control (sure, we can try to prolong life a bit, or end it early, but the ultimate result is the same), induces fear, ranging from anxiety to terror, in large numbers of people - perhaps even the majority.
To me, it's irrational to fear events that are highly improbable, but in view of our survival instinct as humans, it's quite rational to fear something horrible that is absolutely going to happen to you, and there's nothing you can do about it - for example, being scheduled for judicial execution the next day.
For example, on a policy level, Japan never has them. They just don't immigrate any of the religious group who might commit terrorist attacks. So it's a non-issue.
And on a personal level, you can mitigate terror attack risks. Just avoid gatherings of people, basically. You can go as far as you want with this - living off-grid in the forest makes you pretty much fully insulated from terrorist attacks.
So the only question remaining on a personal and policy level is what the cost/benefit is for various things you could do to prevent terrorist attacks.
This is a common mistake. People like to think that some options are impossible, or some gains are free. Thinking this way makes decisions easier; it makes you feel more secure in your opinions. In reality, everything is possible, and everything costs.
I wonder if the reason Japan doesn't have terror attacks is because their military does not deploy outside of their own country (other than UN peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts) and therefore doesn't create terrorist level animosity towards their country and people?
There is still significant animosity towards Japan by several other Asian nations due to atrocities committed during WWII.
This is regularly triggered by various disputes about commonly claimed territory and things such as politicians visiting shrines that house the Japanese war dead (including war criminals). It often leads to rioting and destruction of perceived Japanese things (cars, restaurants, etc) in China.
Still no terrorist attacks in Japan committed by Chinese though despite Japan allowing in large numbers of Chinese visitors, students and workers.
Japanese people live in abject fear of terrorism outside Japan. There have been a few attacks in southeast Asia against venues that Japanese frequent and, owning that the country is extremely safe, it has been completely blown out of proportion.
I have a Japanese friend that has been road-tripping Europe for some time in his vacations and has been unable to convince any (Japanese) friend to go with him. In the last one, he was almost coming with a guy, but at the last moment, that guys mother convinced him to cancel the trip, and this was before the Paris attacks.
I wouldn't say they never happen in Japan - after all, one of the most sophisticated terror groups/cults in modern history was from Japan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo). They were even able to synthesize VX and sarin gas.
I remember being a kid living in Japan, and watching the subway attacks on TV. It was scary.
But to your point, I agree, statistically, Japan is about the safest country there is in terms of human on human violence.
The vast majority of the global death toll attributed to terrorism in the article is in anarchic countries plagued by (civil) war -- Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria.
If you'd like to see a society destabilized by drug abuse, visit some of the... Less well-off reservations. Or these days, anywhere in Appalachia.
Oh? Drugs are not the source of their problems? Well, neither is terrorism. It doesn't happen in a vaccum. The kind of terrorism that destabilizes societies takes place in the middle of civil wars. If you are in the middle of a civil war, terrorism is not your problem.
You are more likely to be struck by lightning, then killed by a terrorist. That doesn't mean that we should spend billions of dollars on outfitting every man, woman, and child, with a Faraday cage.
If you do insist on spending billions of dollars to deal with terrorism, though, perhaps you could look at dealing with the root causes that breed dejected, anti-social, and radicalized young men (Who tend to either join terror cells, or an army.) As a bonus, you'll also probably save quite a lot of people from opiates.
First thing is, people worried about terrorism aren't really worried about terrorism as it is now. They're really worried about what terrorism and ethnic conflict will be like in a few decades when, for example, Muslims are majority in some European countries. Muslim majorities are predicted in several major European countries, using basic conservative demographic projections, this century. How will that be to live in? For a prototype of that, you can look to Lebanon, or how Christians have been faring in Egypt in recent decades.
Here you have to make the distinction between the steady problem and the unlimited-growth problem.
The steady problem is "homegrown" terrorism. While there is always some level of terrorism coming from all groups, that should be addressed with the usual deradicalization and politics programs. Those approaches solved the issue with, for example, IRA terrorism. Which is a good thing, because we have to live with our own people.
The real issue is the one that will grow without limit due to ongoing demographic replacement in the West by Muslims. That's what people are worried about, because people understand that unlike homegrown terrorism, the Islamic terrorism problem can become infinitely bad, and you can end up like the Christians in Egypt. No magical historical force prevents French or Germans or British from ending up living under such deadly tyranny. Sadly, the only real way to stop this is to cease Muslim immigration until some of these data [1] start looking a lot more promising (which will take a century at least). There's certainly no shortage of people wanting to move West from places like India and China, so I see no problem with choosing immigrants who will create better outcomes (and we do that anyway).
If we're willing to discriminate on age and education, we can discriminate on religion - especially when a religion's core beliefs, as interpreted in all its mainstream schools of thought, explicitly opposes the basic egalatarian democratic values of our society.
What does a Muslim majority population have to do with terrorism? I've lived in many Muslim majority neighbourhoods and the closest I've gotten to terrorism is watching it on the news. In fact there was far more terrorism (daily almost) on the news as i was growing up in Ireland. 'Christians' blowing the shit out of each other.
Practically all of the recent Muslim immigrants in Europe are running away from terrorists not becoming them. Fear of a Muslim majority is completely irrational.
It's not. Muslim majority countries worldwide have an appalling human rights record.
Many (most?) have criminal punishment for blasphemy, apostasy and homosexuality. Capital punishment for any of the above is common, and legal in many majority-Muslim states.
There are clear examples of social regression to point to as well. Both Iran and Turkey used to be far more secular and liberal.
True, it's not terrorism. The oppression is usually legal, and at the behest of the majority of the population. But it's reasonable to fear it, especially if you happen to be kuffar, female, or gay.
Europe is not going to introduce Sharia law or anything remotely similar. Pretty sure the gay Muslims I met in Berlin moved there to escape persecution, not mete it out.
Do you know many muslims? I happen to live in a muslim majority area of a major European city. No problems. They're people just like me and you and like most religious people they keep their views to themselves and get on with their lives.
Oh and the area I live in has a muslim politician in charge (and their closest competitor is a Imam) - both have very liberal policies.
Your reasoning seems to be: muslim majority == now they have the power to implement strict religious laws via the democratic process. Well that's absolute nonsense when it's only a tiny minority of them that have these extremist views. I could very easily look at some fundamentalist Christian groups and come to the same conclusions you have but I know that not all Christians believe the crazy crap that some fundamentalists do.
I'm actually terrified reading your comment because you've taken the uneducated bullshit arguments given by people and political parties on the verge of racism/sectarianism and polished it to look like it's intellectual and backed by evidence when that's clearly not the case.
I live in a European city/country with a lot of muslims and they are nothing but a problem - generally speaking (this one cool muslim guy you know is not a rebuttal), they refuse to assimilate, are an enormous burden on the welfare state and are overrepresented in crime. Demanding similar anecdotes from the OP however is an appeal to authority.
You only have to take off your rose tinted blinders and look at the state of affairs in muslim majority countries to see what happens when they are significant in numbers. Even in a "moderate" muslim country like Indonesia gays get arrested. Do you think these societies are a result of their geographic location or the culture/religion? What do you think happens if you only change the location of the people and they keep their culture/religion?
It's far from a "tiny minority" that holds extremist views - there are plenty of polls (check out those from Pew Research Center) that attest to that. You are gravely mistaken if you believe all religions are the same and equally compatible with western ideals.
I do generally agree that terrorism isn't a threat worth changing our lifestyles over.
However, I wonder if it's a little unfair to average out the probabilities and compare to something closer to an actual random event, like falling vending machines; surely, a terrorist attack is significantly more likely to occur in a place like New York than Middle America, no?
I'd really like to see something like what's the probability of being killed by a "falling vending machine" IN NEW YORK vs a terrorist attack IN NEW YORK, than something country wide.
FYI, getting killed by falling vending machines isn't a random event. It happens because people are rocking vending machines back and forth, either to knock loose a stuck purchased product or just to try to steal from them. If you get killed by a falling vending machine it's because you were doing something stupid.
So long as you never rock vending machines, and you shouldn't!!, you are way more likely to be killed by a terrorist, even though the odds of that are incredibly low (one in many, many millions).
Are you talking about successful destabilization efforts by terrorists, or societies destabilizing themselves as a reaction to threats of terrorism? Maybe they're the same?
I'm no expert but isn't China known for having suffered from opium for a long time? If so it's quite relevant here since we're precisely talking about opioids.
You're not entirely wrong. Opium reversed the flows of silver specie that was the lifeblood of the China Trade. Before opium, most of the European trade was Mexican or Peruvian silver for tea, or china, or what have you. After opium, it was those Chinese products, or silver, for opium.
Opium addiction ravaged China (although by the point it really became a public health problem, domestic opium production had exploded). But the wild swings in the price of silver fucked the Qing economy, that had a bimetallic currency between silver taels and copper cash.
The point was reaching destabilization through drug use, which seems to have happened in China, despite the reason. i.e. Chinese are not more susceptible to being drug addicts than any other grouping, so it's noteworthy that policies resulted in such widespread addiction. Therefore, the policies are worth studying as they serve as a red flag for all future generations.
There are pretty ample examples of societies destabilized by drug abuse. See eg. the Opium Wars in China or the usage of methamphetamines in Nazi Germany.
But what destabilizes it, if it remains a statistical anomaly, is irrational, disproportionate terror. Putting other threats in perspective helps prevent that.
The comparison of terrorism to the opioid epidemic (which is both heartbreaking and underreported) or vending machines deaths breaks down when one factors in nuclear weapons, attacks on critical infrastructure, etc. Violence from terrorism has fat tails.
But, of course, multiple things can be bad at once.
The odds of a terrorist group detonating a nuclear weapon are, for all intents and purposes, zero.
The odds of a terrorist group detonating a dirty bomb are not, but the casualties from one will be much, much lower then what they can accomplish with an equivalent effort put into bathtub explosives.
The danger of nation-states using their arsenal of nuclear weapons against each-other is at least two orders of magnitude greater. If those two nation states are the US, and Russia, the death toll will also number in the hundreds of millions.
If you really want to optimize for 'not dying in a nuclear explosion', you should be clamoring for immediate, unconditional disarmament, instead of worrying about orcs from Mordor carrying out Hollywood suitcase nuke plots.
The irrational fear about "terr'ists" the parent post is getting at, though, seems to rarely have anything to do with cataclysmic events like nuclear weapons these days. I literally hear people I know talk about keeping their guard up around Muslims because they're afraid of knife attacks, or you see the TSA freaking out about people pulling their clear plastic bag containing travel size toothpaste out of their suit case when this particular airport doesn't require you to do that. Statistically, individual acts of terrorism like that are indeed exceptionally unusual.
Well, the opioid epidemic is arguably a subset of a broader problem including poorly managed antibiotics and pesticides. Genetic engineering is part of the fat tail here.
Many US citizens still die overseas in terrorist attacks, for instance, 11 American souls were lost this week due to a suicide bomb in Kabul. Not to mention the whole black market economy that surrounds terrorism, along with human trafficking and other dark criminal activity that coalesce together. Quantifying these operations that seek to undermine the integrity and saftety of our societies (sometimes successfully) doesn't really do any favors, especially when putting the staggering amount of hidden costs that we don't know of today into play.
You should probably include most US combat deaths in the terrorism category because, no matter how little Iraq had to do with 9/11, we wouldn't have been in a war there or Afghanistan without terrorism. Veteran suicides and overdoses can probably also be attributed to terrorism as they followed from the wars. War casualties are only in the thousands over the entirety of the war, but there's about 20 veteran suicides per day, so the deaths indirectly attributable to terrorism are actually quite a bit higher than your number.
Veteran suicide rates are comparable to civilian suicide rates, and even including all combat and terrorism deaths in the last 20 years together we're at around 10,000, compared to 35,000 opioid deaths in just 2015.
And honestly, the Iraq war is as related to terrorism as vending machine crush deaths. That was our dumb fault. That was a military industrial complex power grab.
> the Iraq war is as related to terrorism as vending machine crush deaths
This is just wrong. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but 9/11 provided the political cover that the Bush administration needed to take the country to war. Absent that terrorist act, there's no way that the American public and the international community would have stood by and allowed the US invasion to take place the way that they did because of 9/11.
Yes, it was a convenient (one nice block of the table) and admittedly not statistically honest sample.
That said, even if we include the whole of US history (that whole wiki article) it's still an average of roughly 1/100 as many people dying each year of terrorism compared to opioid deaths. Even if we include the whole of US history terrorism deaths, it's still about 1/10 the number of terrorism deaths than opioid deaths just in 2015.
By the numbers yes, but terror alters behavior of society as a whole. But I do agree the overall impact is lower, but at what cost to society? How much resources does it take to keep the impact as low as it is?
Opioids also alters the behavior of society as a whole, to a larger degree than terrorism (albeit in a less flashy manner). When people can't get their addictive painkillers legally, illicit trade and overdosing permeates society, causing cascading side effects to society such as homelessness and crime. This is not normal.
The mere aspect of caring for a child born with what they call neonatal abstinence syndrome e.g. babies addicted to opiates is too much for the current system. Lily's Place in West Virginia is one response, but it's a drop in the national bucket.
http://wvpublic.org/post/lilys-place-continuing-care-addicte...
Now picture a school in a community overrun by this trying to contend with children born addicted to opiates, and parents who merely shrug when social services takes their children away. Portsmouth, Ohio is one that has been hard hit by the opioid epidemic. There is no safety net for this sort of thing, and it's crushing the institutions that it touches while wrecking the community.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/17/drugs-opiod-...
I can feel the anger in this post but please know it's not directed at you or HN. I see this up close and the hopelessness of it all, makes me feel impotent to meaningfully help, and subsequently, angry.
I didn't disagree, but it isn't fair to compare only deaths. Terror can destroy the economy suddenly. Cause huge societal shifts. Opoid epidemic is a horrible and slow wasting. There is a definite "terror isn't a big deal, barely kills anyone" bias on HN. I do agree it is very hard to quantify and endlessly used to abuse authority and gain new authority that doesn't solve real terror problems. And there are real problems. They just get co-opted by politicians.
Anyway, I have direct familial experience with relatives becoming addicted to prescription painkillers, so I don't need to be convinced, I grew up in the deep south, and have seen the impact first hand. Folks go from opiods to alcohol and meth. Their body is cooked by 40. It breaks families and is a quietly suffered epidemic. Terror is flashy and in your face. No one cares if your uncle died when you were 15 addicted to alcohol and meth. You get all sorts of patriotic platitudes about heroism if your relative is killed by a terrorist.
Edit: It informs life choices in interesting ways. When that tough on his luck guy comes over, smelling like a still at 11am, I can relate to where that guy is. So I let him pet my dog on our walk and treat him with kindness, because not many others will. It is about as hopeless a problem as you can find when a family member is in deep. Anyway, we do other things, but everyone has a hard go at it in life, some people just have it harder and deserve compassion. We do other things to help, but everyone loves petting dogs.
Sorry, but I'm going to take a different perspective. This will not destroy society if not stopped. We've had opioid epidemics in the past. Drug choice changes over time. Not long ago meth was the scourge of the land. It will ebb and flow.
Humans have always wanted to use mind altering drugs. What makes that a problem is prohibition. What's nice is I think society is slowly realizing that and turning to harm reduction. The safe injection sites and prescribed heroin are a couple good examples of that.
I'm curious if you have any personal experience with someone addicted to opioids? I think anecdotal evidence is actually relevant in this case, saying people have always done drugs and it's cyclic as if it's a fashion fad does a disservice to what's really going on here. The changes to the strength and how people are being introduced to the drug is far different than the past. You also speak of meth as if it has become less of a problem, while it has done nothing but continue to increase.
I agree that humans have always pursued mind alteration even if it was only spinning in a circle until dizzy. The thing is, I'm not sure if harm reduction will be enough as long as new addicts are being created at this pace. It's going to take a multi pronged approach that requires acknowledging just how bad this whole thing has gotten.
Opioid pain prescriptions used to be very limited and carefully monitored because of the perceived risk of addiction. The prevailing wisdom on this danger was changed because of some low quality papers on the risk that were pushed by drug companies.
Another big driver has been a more effective opioid selling due to some Mexican drug sellers. Interestingly, these sellers are much less violent than previous opioid sellers.
These reasons are outlined in the excellent book 'Dreamland'
Regardless of how we respond, a considerable amount of damage has already been done. From the article, it is estimated that the number of current addicts in Ohio is equivalent to the population of Akron, one of Ohio's bigger towns. This has already wrought havoc on the communities - it's unclear to me whether they would recover even if we could snap our fingers and dispel everyone's addiction instantly. Family members have died, social ties have been altered or destroyed, jobs lost, credit ruined, savings spent, homes foreclosed, and so on.
That's what really kicked this epidemic into high gear. The government decided to "crack down" on pills and now all the people who were hooked switched to heroin, which is harder to gauge dosage because it doesn't say right on the bottle.
I don't think our government is humble enough to admit the mistake, so many more people will die.
So many of the worst tragedies in life seem to be caused by this. Arrogance, shame, saving face, covering your ass. Humans can be so cruel to each other when we try to do the right thing. We bow to peer pressure when we're 16 and end up wrapping mom's sports car around a tree. Ahhh, damn.
> “I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
I agree completely. I also feel for all the pain patients out there that are now being targeted for needing medication. The crazy restrictions the DEA has placed and the fact that virtually every doctor is now terrorized into refusing to prescribe any sort of opioid is hurting real people. We are going about this the wrong way.
No what makes it a problem is the debilitating addiction. It doesn't matter if you buy heroin from a dealer or from Walgreens, it's probably going to ruin your life.
But, by then treating the addiction as a medical condition rather than as criminal activity, that makes it much easier to overcome, and it's easier to intervene with someone performing a legal vs an illegal activity. Portugal experienced a lot of positive results with its decriminalisation of drugs, with the number of heroin users having significantly dropped since that was introduced.
It doesn't magically stop being dangerous, but prohibition clearly doesn't work for any substance.
People need to be able to replace opioids with safer alternatives. Cannabis, kratom, etc. Not going to work for everybody of course but many people will probably be saved that way.
This is something Ive been tracking in the US for a few years even though I live in Australia.
It's painfully obvious why it's been suppressed for so long. All you need to is look at who the top advertisers with news organisations are, then imagine why they very rarely cover negative stories about drug companies.
Hell just to name 1 big example, the elderly couple who were passed out in the car with their grandchild in the back. When it went viral, the claim was they were doing illegal opioids and days later when it settled down it was found out to be prescription meds.
It is already worse than the AIDS epidemic ever was in the US (although that too might come back). It's become a significant factor in declining life expectancies in the US among certain demographics.
This is just as dangerous as terrorists or any other think that goes bump in the night - it will destroy this country if not stopped.
Not sure what the solution is but this looks to be a good start to push for controls needed.