Tuesday, January 26, 2016

The Silent Death - Drug Overdose // Josh Marshall // Talking Points Memo


Among the favorite accusations by conservatives is that Democrats are waging "class war".  But it is the anti-anti-poverty, anti-union, anti-social welfare spending, anti-tax push that is the driving force of class warfare.  Our economy faces enormous challenges: the new technologies are enormously productive but unless we put people to work we suffer a loss of demand.  That requires a commitment to public spending which requires taxation - the cross progressives must be willing to bear.
Meanwhile the lower-skilled who suffer most from the job killing aspects of the new technology suffer the most. - gwc
The Silent Death by Josh Marshall // Talking Points Memo
***Still, as you can see, in 1970, in what many think of as the heyday of the drug culture, overdose was rare - little over 1 per 100,000 Americans per year. Today it's 15 per 100,000. As CDC epidemiologist Dr. Leonard J. Paulozzi put it in 2010, "In the 1970s and 1980s, the annual rate was less than 2 deaths per 100,000 people per year. However, starting in 1990, the rates began to increase dramatically so that now we are approaching 9 or 10 deaths per 100,000 people per year in the United States."

Finally, race. The number are heavily driven by race. The overdose mortality rate for whites was 19 per 100,000 in 2014, 14.7 for African Americans and 6.7 per 100,000 for Hispanics. As you can see from this chart just released by the CDC, not only is the rate for whites higher in absolute terms, the run-up in the numbers are strongly driven by the rise among whites. Moreover, among whites the numbers are concentrated in rural and semi-rural areas and among people at the bottom of the income scale.
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