Seems their comment is gone too. I’d love to have been given the chance to downvote them.
To me this all boils down to what you’re saying, but I’d like to just add mention that i think the bigger disease in the US that enables situations like this is the acceptance of misinformation. As you pointed out, many many many of these cases are started by a medically issued prescription, and it kills multiple times more people than recent wars or terrorist related acts, yet anyone who drives action here is often labeled as “helping junkies that don’t deserve help”.
In the very near future when climate change has destroyed our way of life, and one of the few nations that was capable of doing something is finally and certifiably recognized as having sat by and done nothing, i hope the world takes note. These are the kinds of acts of neglect that make Nero famous, and while i don’t want their names remember, i do want the world to move on from the US being seen as the worlds police and freedom fighters. If Kama is real, the US should be concerned, and as someone that is a close neighbour, it terrifying to think how that will flow on to impact the rest of us.
>"In the very near future when climate change has destroyed out planet"
Maybe people are killing themselves because they are addicted to the fear porn spread by mainstream/social media regarding "climate change". I don't mean this as a joke, I was addicted to financial/economic fear porn for a bit and it did have a negative effect on my outlook.
Climate change is on track to cause catastrophic damage in the next few decades AND there is no indication of anything being seriously done about this. In other words, a train is barrelling and, crucially, there are no signs of anyone intending to stop it. Yeah, I think it's justified to be scared.
There was just a recent discussion here about this and every time I asked for sources and then checked that is not what was found in the primary sources. The catastrophic outlook is created by a few people and amplified by the media as clickbait, not any sort of scientific consensus or track record of successful predictions.
You can go through my recent post history to find it.
Economic collapse and climate change are very different. Climate change news does not evoke the emotion of fear, but rather emotions of disappointment, lament, and anger.
If you think the economic system is scammy, but most people just won't listen, you will experience the exact same emotions you list. So I have to disagree.
The main "fear porn" here that I think relates, and it's more of a tangent than any direct connection, is the propaganda associated with the War On Drugs, just as a comparison to the realities of the opioid epidemic. Some of the issues that were associated with various illegal drug epidemics were legitimate (particularly addictive substances that had the potential to destroy your health like heroin and cocaine), but the propaganda ended up being a moral panic implemented for sometimes questionable (possibly tribalism oriented) reasons, where a few substances (some of them, like cannabis, being relatively harmless) ended up getting demonized, a way-too-high amount of Americans got arrested for trifles as a result, and so forth. Ironically a large portion of the drugs in this epidemic were not in this much demonized category.
Back on topic, the "messaging" here that directly relates, as far as the opioid epidemic goes, is the opposite: the lax regulation of the marketing for prescription drugs. Purdue Pharmaceutical was allowed to engage in a lot of aggressive marketing courting physicians with plenty of symposiums and swag. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/) The marketing hugely downplayed the addiction potential of Oxycontin, over-promoting the use cases and underplaying risk. (Along the way you get some IMHO absurd swag like an Oxycontin-sponsored 50s swing music compilation -- https://www.reddit.com/r/SwingDancing/comments/593xof/til_th... -- I mean, what?) This helped contribute to the opioid over-prescription problem.
Sober, fact based analysis -- present in neither of the above scenarios -- unfortunately is in short supply these days.
Personally, I haven't seen the sort of aggressive marketing you see in America for prescription drugs in any other country -- at least, I don't recall seeing the sort of direct-to-consumer prescription ads anywhere else, (I was able to find articles that said DTCA is quite restricted in Europe --https://www.pharmafield.co.uk/in_depth/pharmaceutical-direct...). I think pharmacy-to-physician marketing is still allowed in most places, but the above shows that work needs to be done to ensure that this marketing also is sober and fact based. Even physicians can be persuaded by "marketing swag". (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5623540/)
Not that I consider the "war on drugs" to be valid in any way, but I haven't seen anything involved with it that is in the same category as the genre of "news" I am talking about:
To me this all boils down to what you’re saying, but I’d like to just add mention that i think the bigger disease in the US that enables situations like this is the acceptance of misinformation. As you pointed out, many many many of these cases are started by a medically issued prescription, and it kills multiple times more people than recent wars or terrorist related acts, yet anyone who drives action here is often labeled as “helping junkies that don’t deserve help”.
In the very near future when climate change has destroyed our way of life, and one of the few nations that was capable of doing something is finally and certifiably recognized as having sat by and done nothing, i hope the world takes note. These are the kinds of acts of neglect that make Nero famous, and while i don’t want their names remember, i do want the world to move on from the US being seen as the worlds police and freedom fighters. If Kama is real, the US should be concerned, and as someone that is a close neighbour, it terrifying to think how that will flow on to impact the rest of us.