The Opioid Addiction "Crisis"

Everywhere you turn lately, it's the same meme: "Opioid addiction is the #1 health CRISIS in America! It's an EPIDEMIC!! We need to FUND emergency programs!!!"

Stop the presses! We have yet another CRISIS!! The politicians all have the same talking point it seems. My U.S. congresswoman cosponsored a bill on this.

I wondered if this were indeed true. My gut told me that, no, ALCOHOL is still the #1 addiction problem in this country and far exceeds opioid addiction.

Is opioid addiction a problem? Yes. But it's not the MAIN addiction problem going on. It's just the "new" one that they want to throw our tax dollars at right now! And, rest assured, there are TONS of existing and forthcoming NGOs, PPPs, nonprofit 501(C)3s, treatment centers (inpatient drug addiction treatment facilities have a 7% success rate), mental health facilities, etc. just DYING to get their hands on that MONEY.

(Please don't respond to this with some anecdotal story about how you, your friend, relative, neighbor, etc. has/had an opioid addiction. We are looking at MACRO, not MICRO.)

It didn't take long to find info to put this into perspective. Here is an excerpt from a late 2016 article:

Barbara Mason, an addiction scientist at Scripps Research, said she appreciated that the report placed alcohol abuse in the same category as use of illicit drugs.

“The prevalence of alcohol addiction exceeds that of all illicit drugs combined,” said Mason, who directs the institute’s Pearson Center for Alcoholism and Addiction Research.

Yet misleading coverage by some media organizations can give the impression that addiction is mostly about the abuse of illegal drugs, Mason said.

“USA Today’s coverage of the surgeon general’s report … makes it sound like all of the addiction is illicit drugs, and that keeps alcohol swept under the carpet,” she added. “(Alcohol) really is a cost leader in terms of deaths, lost work days and motor vehicle fatalities, but it gets a fraction of the (National Institutes of Health) money that illicit drugs get.” The National Institutes of Health is the country’s predominant funding source for biomedical research.

Here's an excerpt from a NY Times article (this year) on the "epidemic," which includes both legal and illegal opioids.

Opioid addiction is America’s 50-state epidemic. It courses along Interstate highways in the form of cheap smuggled heroin, and flows out of “pill mill” clinics where pain medicine is handed out like candy. It has ripped through New England towns, where people overdose in the aisles of dollar stores, and it has ravaged coal country, where addicts speed-dial the sole doctor in town licensed to prescribe a medication.

Public health officials have called the current opioid epidemic the worst drug crisis in American history, killing more than 33,000 people in 2015. Overdose deaths were nearly equal to the number of deaths from car crashes. In 2015, for the first time, deaths from heroin alone surpassed gun homicides.

"An estimated 88,000⁸ people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women⁸) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States. The first is tobacco, and the second is poor diet and physical inactivity.^{9 "}

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/alcohol-facts-and-statistics

So, let's do some MATH, shall we? 88,000 / 33,000 = about 2 and 2/3. So, obviously not 3x as many but certainly over twice as many die from alcohol-related causes than the opioid "epidemic."

Do you guys know what the #1 cause of mental retardation is worlwide? It is FAS, or fetal alcohol syndrome from mommy drinking while pregnant. There are MILLIONS of folks, both children and adults, diagnosed as ADHD, autistic, and Aspberger's syndrome who are actually FASD (fetal alcohol spectrum disorder). Yes, it is a SPECTRUM. The FASD folks had a mother who drank enough to do some type of neurological damage (it doesn't always involve IQ) but not enough to be full-blown FAS. Surprisingly, alcohol is so tetragenic it does MORE DAMAGE to a developing fetus than heroin or cocaine.

https://www.thespiritsbusiness.com/2015/02/alcohol-in-pregnancy-worse-than-heroin-or-cocaine/

That is not a tangential point but goes directly to the FACT that this is truly an alcohol-related EPIDEMIC that NOBODY is talking about. Obviously, these figures should be ADDED TO the number of people adversely affected by alcohol (not the death figure).

So, some food for thought. Suddenly this opioid CRISIS is an emergency, while the larger problem takes a lower priority (see the quote about NIH funding).

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