Drug overdoses are driving up the death rate of young white adults in the United States to levels not seen since the end of the AIDS epidemic more than two decades ago.

This isn't something new

Opiates were widely used in the US since the founding of the nation. Laudanum - essentially liquid opium - was used by women and morphine was used on the battlefield to treat soldiers. Following the American Civil War, "soldier's disease" - aka morphine addiction, became a serious issue.

Bayer worked to create a less-addictive opiate, and Heroin was born. Of course, we now know that heroin is massively more addictive than morphine... but in the early 1900s it was used and created a problem to follow.

Now, let's look at how history repeated itself. In the early 2000s pills like oxycontin were widely prescribed because the pharmaceutical companies believed (and told doctors) that they would be less addictive / abusable than previous incarnations of painkillers. The thinking here was similar to what birthed benzos as an alternative to barbiturates.

Funny how that repeated itself, eh? The grim reality became that people realized they could disable the time-release mechanisms on their pills and use them for a high.

The pills themselves have gotten harder to get and more expensive, but the end of the previous regimes in Afghanistan and wide demand (and availability) of pure, cheap opiates has opened the floodgates to addiction once again.

To be frank though, this isn't something new. There is a group of people who for a variety of reasons are susceptible to addiction. It's no surprise that the most addictive substances are also the ones that give users the ability to temporarily elude unpleasant emotional states (opiates, benzos, alcohol) or an artificial sense of control (amphetamines, stimulants).

It's also no surprise that the least-addictive substances are the ones that are psychologically unpleasant - there's very little peyote demand among the chronically depressed.

Until we as a nation end the fake war on drugs and reopen the mental health system in the United States, we're not going to be able to address this problem. It's simply a genetic lottery.

We can't get rid of opiates, they're too important for surgery and preventing shock in the cast of acute trauma. As someone who has meditated through a root canal (I react horribly to anesthesia and anesthetics) - it's unimaginable to suggest getting rid of those from a hospital.

Since people are inevitably going to be exposed, we have to have the support system there to recognize and treat addiction. Our current system of stigmatizing addicts, shoving pill abusers into largely religious "rehab" centers with horrible recidivism rates, or housing them perpetually in prisons - is not a solution.

/r/news Thread Link - nytimes.com