100 Americans die of drug overdoses each day. How do we stop that?

POSTED BY: kpo
UPDATED: Saturday, October 25, 2025 15:26
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JONGSSTRAW

Sunday, March 23, 2014 6:49 AM

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Originally posted by whozit:
100 less douchebags per day living on welfare and food stamps, good riddance. The world is better off without them.

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REAVERFAN

Sunday, March 23, 2014 7:54 AM

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:

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Originally posted by whozit:
100 less douchebags per day living on welfare and food stamps, good riddance. The world is better off without them.

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It's not that simple an equation, especially when there are children concerned. Drug addiction and alcoholism are leading causes of spousal abuse and child neglect. Under-funded law enforcement and social welfare efforts are often constrained or obstructed by individuals' rights. But somewhere in that frustrating reality is the solution.

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SIGNYM

Sunday, March 23, 2014 8:16 AM

Simple- don't put people in a cage, stress them in unavoidable ways, pump "can-do-happy-face messages at them all day, and expect them to keep on functioning when the upper reaches of society are actively predating on them.

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OONJERAH

Sunday, March 23, 2014 9:11 AM

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Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:

You can't save people from themselves, and ya shouldn't oughta try.

-F

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1KIKI

Sunday, March 23, 2014 1:46 PM

I've been thinking - there's the fear/ stress adrenaline/ cortisol pathways, the amity/ bonding oxytocin pathway, and the addiction/ reward-seeking dopamine pathway. Oxytocin inhibits addiction and reduces adrenalin and stress, but too much stress overpowers oxytocin.

I wonder if autistics and other people with neurological malfunctions live with high levels of internal stress, leading to lack of a functional oxytocin effect, and a-sociality. ie, they have a functioning amity system, but the signal is weaker than the stress signal. Perhaps that's why autistics, when given oxytocin nasal spray behave much more socially normally. Animals stressed early in life develop abnormal social behaviors.

OTOH people who live with chronic external stress from poverty or dysfunctional families for example may develop addictive type behaviors, as addiction provides an alternative reward to a weakened amity system. Animals stressed later in life voluntarily drink a lot.

OTOH people who are raised primarily by extrinsic reward dopamine pathway don't develop a fully functioning amity system and so exhibit both addictive and sociopathic tendencies as exemplified by rich people. (Born sociopaths otoh don't have a functional amity system.)

This is just some speculation I've been kicking around. But I think the kind of society we live in influences broad-scale the type of people we create. And the moral of my musings is, if you want to reduce addiction you have to reduce societal stress, reduce external reward, and increase early life societal amity. (And then there's epigenetics ...)

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OONJERAH

Sunday, March 23, 2014 2:33 PM

^^^

Does that mean addicts could be made after birth?

The nurture -> conditioning psychological part of it always seemed like a
most influencial part of what we become. It'd be second to our Selves, to
our individual intent. Some environments impose max stress in order to
suppress the individual's own will.

non-sequitur: Remind me sometime to cite evidence of alcoholic rats.


============================= :>

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1KIKI

Sunday, March 23, 2014 9:11 PM

Does that mean addicts could be made after birth? I think so. Alcoholism rates go up and down inversely with mode income. If environment didn't affect alcoholism rates, I don't think that would be so.

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OONJERAH

Wednesday, March 8, 2017 4:50 AM

Must be Sometime.

Roger John Williams (1893 – 1988), American biochemist, worked at
the University of Texas at Austin. Wrote a number of books for the public.
A few on alcoholism.
1951 Nutrition and Alcoholism
1981 The Prevention of Alcoholism Through Nutrition
1959 - 1978 Alcoholism: The Nutritional Approach

I am no chemist brainiac, but I read enough of Williams' stuff
to get this: Alcoholism occurs in creatures, both human & rat, that
have a deficiency of the liver enzyme, acetaldehyde-dehydrogenase*.
Low levels of that enzyme combined with a taste for alcohol
tend to result in alcoholism.
(How it works: alcohol enters the liver; acetaldehyde-dehydrogenase
changes 1 cell of the alcohol molecule from alcohol to sugar.
So for most folks, alcoholic beverages are more like eating candy
than getting drunk.)

The alcoholic himself is often mystified by the fact that, no matter
how sincerely he swears off the sauce, he is soon drunk on his ass again.

In spite of this, many alcoholics do sober up permanently.

*there are quite a few articles on the web about this enzyme.

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JEWELSTAITEFAN

Thursday, March 9, 2017 4:45 AM

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Originally posted by kpo:
A long, but fascinating read:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/02/07/100-america
ns-die-of-drug-overdoses-each-day-how-do-we-stop-that/

Some excerpts:

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Overdosing is now the leading cause of accidental death in the United States, accounting for more deaths than traffic fatalities or gun homicides and suicides. Fatal overdoses from opiate medications such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, and methadone have quadrupled since 1999, accounting for an estimated 16,651 deaths in 2010.

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KH: News reports about batches of “killer heroin” are typically overblown. But unusually strong doses of a drug are in fact rarely the cause of overdose. Toxicology results after a fatal overdose usually indicate that the victim has consumed either their normal dosage level or a dose slightly lower than their normal level. It’s too late to fix the language, but “poisoning” might be a better term than overdose.
You might ask: Why would an experienced user die from taking their normal dose? Typically overdose occurs because they've had a loss of tolerance. This loss of tolerance often arises because they haven't used for a while. Maybe they had a voluntary period of abstinence. Maybe they were in jail, and their body can no longer handle the same dose.
The other leading cause of loss of tolerance is consumption of other substances. This is particularly true of alcohol, which seems to lower the body's ability to tolerate opiates (so do benzodiazepines). Most of what we call “opiate overdoses” are really polydrug overdoses: alcohol and heroin, alcohol and oxycontin, benzodiazepine, alcohol and Vicodin, combinations like that.

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It is pretty amazing. Many people are focusing on the return of heroin and saying, "It's all the fault of criminals." You've got to remember, 4 in 5 of people today who start using heroin began their opioid addiction on prescription opioids. The responsibility doesn't start today with the stereotypical criminal street dealer. We basically created this problem with legally manufactured drugs that were legally prescribed. This really flies in the face of the argument that if we just had a flow of legal drugs, the harms would be minimal.

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In the late 1990s, many medical societies became appropriately concerned about poor pain management in the United States. Many patients were not receiving needed pain relief, which was and remains a very serious problem. That worthy concern for improved pain management became fused with the pharmaceutical industry’s profit-seeking goals, which they pursued through aggressively pushing opioids in primary care settings and doing a lot of deceptive marketing.
Purdue Pharma was fined $600 million for deceiving regulators, doctors and patients about the addiction and overdose risks of OxyContin. They told prescribers not to worry, saying that the drug wouldn’t be abused and there was little risk in even very high doses. These claims turned out to be untrue.

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I was on a public radio call-in program yesterday and heard multiple stories of people with mild pain being written refillable prescriptions for large numbers of opioid painkillers.. There's a lot of that andit's irresponsible and dangerous. What happens is either the person takes all the medicine, which they shouldn't, and maybe they start then developing a problem. Alternatively, they take two pills and then there's a bunch of Vicodin or OxyContin sitting in the medicine cabinet for someone else to find: a local teenager, a friend of a friend, a guest at a party. Overprescribing and then loose storage fueled the epidemic. It's still true today. When you ask people who abuse prescription opioids, "Where do you get them?" Their usual source is friends and family, not street purchases. It's frightening, we've flooded the whole country with these things and they're everywhere.

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Add one other thing; when people lose the

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