July 15, 2021 - 7:00am
What killed Americans in 2020?
A fascinating, if grim, chart from the Lyman Stone paints an extraordinary picture. Based on data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it shows the year-on-year change in various external causes of death.
The main “external causes” are suicide, homicide, motor vehicle accidents and drug overdoses. They exclude diseases and other medical conditions. Therefore the chart does not show the deaths caused directly by Covid-19.
But what about the indirect impacts? Many people feared that the economic hardship and social isolation caused by the pandemic and the lockdowns would manifest in higher levels of suicide. But the evidence for that is thin. Certainly, there is scant indication of it in the CDC data.
What we do so see, however, is a massive increase in drug overdoses. So could these be concealing a hidden rise in suicides? Probably not. Stone points out that accidental overdoses are distinguished from deliberate ones and the latter is included in the suicide figures. It could be that errors are being made in establishing intention, but why would there be an increase in one method of suicide and not the others?
Furthermore, the rising trend in drug overdoses was well-established before the pandemic. And it’s not hard to find a cause for that: America’s opioid epidemic. In particular, there’s the latest acute phase of the crisis, the surge in deaths caused by the most potent opioids — principally, fentanyl.
A chart from a VoxEU article by David Cutler and Edward Glaeser makes the trend clear:
There’s a debate as to whether the opioid epidemic was originally caused by pull or push factors. In other words, was the key factor an increase in demand for painkillers or was it an increase in supply?
Cutler and Glaeser lean heavily towards the supply side. Though opioids are used to treat physical pain and misused for other reasons; the authors note that there was no increase in the relevant medical conditions that might support a demand-led explanation for the rise of addiction and deaths. Nor was there a sufficient fall in levels of life satisfaction during the key period.
What does coincide with the origins of the epidemic, however, is the marketing of new legal opioids followed by the opportunistic expansion of the illegal trade. Furthermore, the authors argue, this has all happened before with previous pharmaceutical innovations.
Will we ever learn?
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SubscribeTo stop giving suffering people pain relief is much worse than some people overdosing on pain pills they took illegally.
And this is the case now. Doctors and dentists too afraid of the law to treat their patients as they should, try getting some real pain or sleep drugs today.
One of mankind’s most wonderful blessings was the pain relief of Morphine in the mid 1800s, as opium had been used for millennia previous.
I do not like the ‘Medical Industrial Complex’ at all, corrupt, and corrupting of government to the very highest levels – the exclusion of Ivermectin to force the mRNA is a crime against humanity…This covid response was brought to us by the MIC to a big degree, all the top experts and lobbyists are in their pay.
But rednecks OD-ing on Fentanyl? That is another issue. That is a long story used by trial lawyers to win billions of $ from class action suites.
The “War on Drugs” was lost long ago reflected in the lowering of prices for a dose. The Fentanyl drug is remarkably cheap and pours into Mexico from China then on to the US where amateur chemists try to dilute it to avoid killing their clients. But it’s extraordinary powerful, too easy to make errors in dilution for resale. That alone leads to clients overdosing. Odd that the US tolerates the Chinese undermining society with the help of the open borders crowd. The merchants of death are all too happy to participate as are corrupt officials who gain from tragedy.