Chasing the dragon
Finding light
“Although the accepted wisdom about the US overdose crisis singles out prescribing…the crisis is fundamentally fueled by economic and social upheaval, its etiology closely linked to the role of opioids as a refuge from physical and psychological trauma, concentrated disadvantage, isolation, and hopelessness.”
Opioid Crisis: No Easy Fix to Its Social and Economic Determinants, Nabarun Dasgupta, PhD, MPH, Leo Beletsky, JD, MPH, and Daniel Ciccarone, MD, MPH American Journal of Public Health, December 2017
This is a personal, non-fiction essay about the opioid epidemic and how we respond.
Substance abuse is notoriously intractable; the most common prognosis I’ve heard is 3 of 10 “recover” as opposed to die from an addiction, but it’s hard to imagine a distinguishing factor — other than fatal drug toxicity or terminal cirrhosis, perhaps deaths from hepatitis and in drug deals gone bad — -that I would accept between recovered or not for all people.
I’d know individually when I spoke with most, I believe, even if they weren’t still…
