Mapping America"s Worst States For Binge-Drinking This Christmas

Alcohol abuse can result in health problems including memory loss, poor decision making, fetal damage, liver diseases, hypertension and cardiovascular problems... but "tis the season...

As Statista"s Niall McCarthy notes, a recent report by the United Health Foundation found that 18.5 percent of U.S. adults engage in binge or chronic drinking.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Binging is defined as having four or more (for women) or five or more (for men) drinks on one occasion in the past 30 days. Chronic drinking is having eight or more (for women) or 15 or more (for men) drinks per week. The U.S. has an annual average of 87,798 alcohol attributable deaths while 12,460 road deaths were due to alcohol consumption between 2006 and 2010.

An estimated 2.5 million years of U.S. life have been lost due to alcohol abuse between 2006 and 2010. As well as its massive impact on human health, alcohol also has huge financial and economic repercussions. Excessive alcohol consumption cost the U.S. $249 billion in 2010 or $2.05 for each beverage consumed.

The lowest rates of excessive drinking in U.S. states were recorded in West Virginia (11.8 percent), Oklahoma (12.8 percent) and Utah (13.4 percent).

The infographic above shows the 10 states with the highest levels of binge and chronic drinking with Wisconsin on top with 26.2 percent. North Dakora comes second with 25.9 percent while Minnesota rounds off the top three with 22.9 percent.

British Woman Faces Execution In Egypt For Bringing Painkillers For Her Husband"s Bad Back

Authored by Ian Miles Cheong via The Daily Caller,

A British woman has been arrested upon her arrival in Egypt for bringing a box of painkiller medication into the country for her husband’s back pain. Now she faces the possibility of execution.

The Sun reported Saturday that 33-year-old Laura Plummer is facing a 25-year prison sentence, or execution, after airport authorities discovered Tramadol and Naproxen in her suitcase.

Plummer, who arrived in Egypt’s Hurghada airport on October 9, was flying to meet her husband Omar. The paper reported that Plummer signed a 38-page statement in Arabic believing that it meant she thought she could leave. Instead, she was taken to a 15 foot by 15 foot cell where she has been kept with 25 other women for almost a month, her family said.

Her sister Jayne Sinclair, 40, told The Sun that she feared that her sister would attempt to end her life after being locked for 26 days in “repulsive” conditions.

Sinclair told The Sun: “Her life’s in danger. She can’t stay in there any longer or she will be murdered or kill herself. We went out to see her last week and my mum collapsed at the sight of her. She looked over at us and said ‘mum, mum, please help me, help me’.”

Her mother, Roberta Sinclair, 63, claims her daughter “had no idea she was doing anything wrong.”

“The painkillers were placed at the top of her suitcase, she wasn’t hiding them,” she told The Sun. “We’ve been told she’s facing either 25 years in prison or the death penalty. We’re beside ourselves worrying that they’ll make an example of her.”

Her family says that the painkillers were intended for Plummer’s husband, Omar, who suffers from back pain after an accident. She took 29 strips of tramadol, each containing ten tablets, and Naproxen. In Britain, tramadol is a prescription-only drug, and it is banned in Turkey because drug addicts use it as a substitute for heroin.

However, each pill only costs 8p (10 cents), meaning Plummer would have only made around $30 if she intended to sell them.

Before her text was turned off, Plummer told her father Neville via text: “I’m in trouble and I need your help.” The 70-year-old says he’s spent £10,000 ($13,079) on legal bills already in an attempt to help his daughter.

Since her arrest last month, they have visited her and said she has been in court twice. Plummer’s sister Jayne told The Sun: “She is still wearing the same clothes she flew out in. When she came into court that first time she looked dead behind the eyes and was handcuffed to a 6ft 4in policeman holding a machine gun.”

Sinclair added: “She kept saying, ‘Please help me, please help me.’ She looked like a little child again.”

In a statement to The Times, the U.K. Foreign Office said: “We are supporting a British woman and her family following her detention in Egypt.”

Visualizing America's Disappearing Workforce

In his September 2017 paper entitled "Where Have All the Workers Gone? An Inquiry into the Decline of the U.S. Labor Force Participation Rate", Alan B. Krueger of Princeton University explores the dramatic fall in labor force participation in the U.S. from 1997 to 2017.

As Statista"s Martin Armstrong shows in the infographic below, over the last twenty years, the rate has fallen the most for the under 20"s, with the share of 16 to 17 year olds in work dropping by 18.4 and 16.2 percentage points for men and women, respectively.

You will find more statistics at Statista

As Krueger reports, last year, Italy was the only OECD country which had a lower participation rate of prime age men than the United States. One of the reasons posited by the research is the opioid crisis currently ravaging the country. Labor force participation rates have fallen more in areas where more opioid pain medication is prescribed. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the amount of opioids prescribed in 2015 was three times higher than it was in 1999.

As noted in the paper, while the direction of causality is not clear, a 2017 report by David Mericle entitled "The Opioid Epidemic and the U.S. Economy" states that “the opioid epidemic is intertwined with the story of declining prime-age participation, especially for men, and this reinforces our doubts about a rebound in the participation rate.”

But as we pointed out previously, after spending months, or maybe even years, running very complicated regressions that your simple mind could never possibly understand, Krueger would like for you to believe that it"s the growing opioid epidemic that is forcing men to sit on their couches all day rather than look for work.  Here"s a summary of his findings from the Brookings Institute:

The increase in opioid prescriptions from 1999 to 2015 could account for about 20 percent of the observed decline in men’s labor force participation (LFP) during that same period.

In “Where have all the workers gone? An inquiry into the decline of the U.S. labor force participation rate” (PDF), Princeton University’s Alan Krueger examines the labor force implications of the opioid epidemic on a local and national level.

Among other findings, the research suggests that:

• Regional variation in opioid prescription rates across the U.S. is due in large part to differences in medical practices, rather than varying health conditions. Pain medication is more widely used in counties where health care professionals prescribe greater quantities of opioid medication, with a 10 percent increase in opioid prescriptions per capita is associated with a 2 percent increase in the share of individuals who report taking a pain medication on any given day. When accounting for individuals’ disability status, self-reported health, and demographic characteristics, the effect is cut roughly in half, but remains statistically significant.

• Over the last 15 years, LFP fell more in counties where more opioids were prescribed. Krueger reaches this conclusion by linking 2015 county-level opioid prescription rates to individual level labor force data in 1999-2001 and 2014-16. For more on the relationship between prescription rates and labor force participation rate on the county-level.

Krueger also provided this very helpful map proving that opioid abuse is highly correlated to unemployment.  Of course, it couldn"t possibly be the case that opioid abuse is the result of high unemployment and the associated depression that goes along with it...no, the opioid abuse definitely came first.

So, what is Krueger"s solution to help reverse the seemingly perpetual decline in labor force participation rates?  If you guessed "Obamacare" then you"re absolutely right...and unfortunately, no, that is not a joke...here is the excerpt from page 38 of Krueger"s paper:

Third, addressing the decades-long slide in labor force participation by prime age men should be a national priority. This group expresses low levels of SWB and reports finding relatively little meaning in their daily activities. Because nearly half of this group reported being in poor health, it may be possible for expanded health insurance coverage and preventative care under the Affordable Care Act to positively affect the health of prime age men going forward.

And while we would never presume to be smart enough to question the very thorough, impartial research of a Princeton economist, we do wonder whether it"s in any way relevant that labor force participation rates seemingly started to decline in 1965...

...at exactly the same time that welfare spending started to surge?

It"s probably just a coincidence.

Small-Town American Budgets Devastated By Opioid Crisis As 41 States Subpoena Big Pharma

A surge in Opioid consumption, primarily prescription painkillers, heroin and fentanyl - a drug 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine - and the resulting spike in overdose related deaths is devastating families in rural America.  But the opioid epidemic is laying waste to more than just the broken families it counts among its victims, as Reuters points out today, rural municipalities are finding it nearly impossible to fund the surging costs associated with overdoses which come in the form of emergency call volumes, medical examiner and coroner bills, and overcrowded jails and courtrooms.  

As an example, Ross County, Ohio, a town of only 77,000, says its budget for child services has doubled in just 5 years and 75% of the children place into protection come from homes where parents have opioid addictions.

Ross County, a largely rural region of 77,000 people an hour south of Columbus, Ohio, is wrestling with an explosion in opioid-related deaths - 44 last year compared to 19 in 2009. The drug addiction epidemic is shattering not just lives but also stressing the county budget.

About 75 percent of the 200 children placed into state care in the county have parents with opioid addictions, up from about 40 percent five years ago, local officials say. Their care is more expensive because they need specialist counseling, longer stays and therapy.

That has caused a near doubling in the county’s child services budget to almost $2.4 million from $1.3 million, said Doug Corcoran, a county commissioner.

For a county with a general fund of just $23 million, that is a big financial burden, Corcoran said. He and his colleagues are now exploring what they might cut to pay for the growing costs of the epidemic, such as youth programs and economic development schemes.

But it"s not just the cost of child services that is wreaking havoc on municipal budgets as everything from autopsy and toxicology costs to court fees and jail expenses are surging throughout rural America.

Autopsy and toxicology costs there have nearly doubled in six years, from about $89,000 in 2010 to $165,000 in 2016, county data shows.

Court costs are soaring, mainly because of the expense of prosecuting opioid-related crimes and providing accused with a public defender, local officials say.

The county is using contingency funds to pay for the added coroner costs, said Mike Baker, the county’s top government official. Last year, the county drew $63,000 from those funds, up from $19,000 in 2014, he said. In 2014, the county saw 10 drug-related deaths. In 2016, the number had grown to 53.

In Mercer County, West Virginia, 300 miles (483 km) to the south of Indiana County, opioid-related jail costs are carving into the small annual budget of $12 million for the community of 62,000 people.

The county’s jail expenses are on course to increase by $100,000 this year, compared to 2015. The county pays $48.50 per inmate per day to the jail, and this year the jail is on course to have over 2,000 more “inmate days” compared to 2015, according to county data.

“At least 90 percent of those extra jail costs are opioid-related,” said Greg Puckett, a county commissioner who sits on a national county opioid task force. “We spend more in one month on our jail bill than we spend per month on economic development, our health department and our emergency services combined.”

Meanwhile, as Bloomberg has just noted, attorneys general from 41 states are broadening their investigation into the opioid industry and have served subpoenas to five pharma companies that make the most powerful prescription painkillers.

They announced Tuesday that they had served subpoenas requesting information from five companies that make powerful prescription painkillers and three distributors. Forty-one attorneys general are involved.

The investigation into marketing and sales practices seeks to find out whether the industry"s own actions worsened the epidemic.

If the industry cooperates, the investigation could lead to a national settlement.

The Healthcare Distribution Alliance said in a statement that it"s not responsible for the volume of opioid prescribing but that it does want to work on solving the public health crisis.

Dozens of local and state governments have already filed, announced or publicly considered lawsuits against drugmakers or distributors.

To add some context to the scale of the opioid epidemic, the California Department of Public Health recently dropped some staggering statistics showing that there are a remarkable number of counties in California where annual prescriptions for pain killers actually exceed the population.  

Trinity County is the state’s fourth-smallest, and ended last year with an estimated population of 13,628 people.

Its residents also filled prescriptions for oxycodone, hydrocodone and other opioids 18,439 times, the highest per capita rate in California.

Besides Trinity, other counties with more prescriptions than people include Lake, Shasta, Tuolumne and Del Norte counties. In the Sacramento region, El Dorado, Placer and Sacramento counties had prescription rates above the statewide average, with Yolo County slightly below the state average.

A county’s prescription total represents all opioids dispensed via prescriptions filled at a pharmacy and tracked by the state. Statewide, 15 percent of Californians were prescribed opioids in 2016, ranging from 7.3 percent of residents in tiny Alpine County to almost 27 percent in Lake County.

As might be expected, the scripts per capita are highest in California"s more rural northern counties.

So who is participating most in this deadly epidemic?  Well, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the biggest abusers of opioids are high-school educated, unemployed, white people living in small towns...

“The following characteristics were associated with higher amounts of opioids prescribed: a larger percentage of non-Hispanic whites; higher rates of uninsured and Medicaid enrollment; lower educational attainment; higher rates of unemployment; (small-town) status; more dentists and physicians per capita; a higher prevalence of diagnosed diabetes, arthritis, and disability; and higher suicide rates,” concluded the authors of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released in July.

“What you’re seeing in California is what you’re seeing in many parts of the country, including Oregon,” Korthuis said. “There are still a lot of rural counties around the U.S. that are awash in prescription opioids.”

Of course, growth in opioid addiction is hardly just a California phenomenon.  According to the CDC"s Annual Surveillance Report of Drug-Related Risks and Outcomes, addiction-related deaths are far more prevalent in the rural "rust-belt" states of the Midwest.

Meanwhile, the epidemic is growing far more severe every year with overdose deaths up 167% across the country since 1999.

The rate of drug overdose deaths increased from 6.1 per 100,000 population in 1999 to 16.3 in 2015; for unintenttional drug overdose deaths, the rate increased from 4.0 per 100,000 in 1999 to 13.8 in 2015; for drug overdose deaths involving any opioid, the rate increased from 2.9 per 100,000 in 1999 to 10.4 in 2015 (p<0.05); for unintenttional drug overdose deaths involving any opioid, the rate increased from 2.1 per 100,000 in 1999 to 9.3 per 100,000 in 2015 (p<0.05). For all four categories of drug overdose deaths, increases in rates were largest from 2013 to 2015, with the rate increasing on average by 9% per year for overall drug overdose deaths (p<0.05), 11% per year for unintenttional drug overdose deaths (p<0.05), 15% per year for drug overdose deaths involving any opioid (p<0.05), and 16% for unintenttional drug overdose deaths involving any opioid (p<0.05).

But don"t worry too much because, as Princeton Economist Alan Krueger told us recently, there is a simple solution to the opioid epidemic in the U.S...apparently it can all be solved with just a little more Obamacare.

Here Are The California Counties Where Annual Opioid Scripts Outnumber People

The California Department of Public Health just dropped some staggering statistics about the level of opioid abuse in America"s progressive paradise of the left coast.  As the Sacramento Bee points out, there are a remarkable number of counties in California where annual prescriptions for pain killers actually exceed the population.  

Trinity County is the state’s fourth-smallest, and ended last year with an estimated population of 13,628 people.

Its residents also filled prescriptions for oxycodone, hydrocodone and other opioids 18,439 times, the highest per capita rate in California.

Besides Trinity, other counties with more prescriptions than people include Lake, Shasta, Tuolumne and Del Norte counties. In the Sacramento region, El Dorado, Placer and Sacramento counties had prescription rates above the statewide average, with Yolo County slightly below the state average.

A county’s prescription total represents all opioids dispensed via prescriptions filled at a pharmacy and tracked by the state. Statewide, 15 percent of Californians were prescribed opioids in 2016, ranging from 7.3 percent of residents in tiny Alpine County to almost 27 percent in Lake County.

As might be expected, the scripts per capita are highest in California"s more rural northern counties.

So who is participating most in this deadly epidemic?  Well, according the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the biggest abusers of opioids are high-school educated, unemployed, white people living in small towns...

“The following characteristics were associated with higher amounts of opioids prescribed: a larger percentage of non-Hispanic whites; higher rates of uninsured and Medicaid enrollment; lower educational attainment; higher rates of unemployment; (small-town) status; more dentists and physicians per capita; a higher prevalence of diagnosed diabetes, arthritis, and disability; and higher suicide rates,” concluded the authors of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released in July.

“What you’re seeing in California is what you’re seeing in many parts of the country, including Oregon,” Korthuis said. “There are still a lot of rural counties around the U.S. that are awash in prescription opioids.”

...oh, and grandma and grandpa are getting high on the reg as well.

In California, residents aged 15 to 29 got 1.7 million prescriptions in 2016, representing 7.2 percent of the state total. That’s down from the 1.9 million prescriptions in 2015, which represented about 7.8 percent of the state total. The age range that featured the largest prescription rate increase were 70- to74-year-olds, whose prescriptions grew from almost 1,354 per 1,000 people in 2015 to 1,394 per 1,000 people in 2016.

Of course, growth in opioid addiction is hardly just a California phenomenon.  According to the CDC"s Annual Surveillance Report of Drug-Related Risks and Outcomes, addiction-related deaths are far more prevalent in the rural "rust-belt" states of the Midwest.

Meanwhile, the epidemic is growing far more severe every year with overdose deaths up 167% across the country since 1999.

The rate of drug overdose deaths increased from 6.1 per 100,000 population in 1999 to 16.3 in 2015; for unintenttional drug overdose deaths, the rate increased from 4.0 per 100,000 in 1999 to 13.8 in 2015; for drug overdose deaths involving any opioid, the rate increased from 2.9 per 100,000 in 1999 to 10.4 in 2015 (p<0.05); for unintenttional drug overdose deaths involving any opioid, the rate increased from 2.1 per 100,000 in 1999 to 9.3 per 100,000 in 2015 (p<0.05). For all four categories of drug overdose deaths, increases in rates were largest from 2013 to 2015, with the rate increasing on average by 9% per year for overall drug overdose deaths (p<0.05), 11% per year for unintenttional drug overdose deaths (p<0.05), 15% per year for drug overdose deaths involving any opioid (p<0.05), and 16% for unintenttional drug overdose deaths involving any opioid (p<0.05).

But don"t worry too much because, as Princeton Economist Alan Krueger told us yesterday, there is a simple solution to the opioid epidemic in the U.S...apparently it can all be solved with just a little more Obamacare.

Princeton Economist: Nearly Half Of Working Age Men Not In The Labor Force Take Opioids Daily

Esteemed Princeton professor and former Obama White House economist Alan Krueger is back with yet another prediction about why Americans, particularly men between the ages of 25-54, suddenly no longer have any interest in working.  In his report, entitled "Where Have All The Workers Gone? An Inquiry Into The Decline Of The U.S. Labor Force Participation Rate," Krueger ponders the data below which reveal that the labor force participation rate among men, aged 25-54, started dropping around 1965 and has been steadily declining ever since.

Of course, it couldn"t possibly have anything to do with stagnant real wages or soaring entitlements that have provided massive, and increasing, disincentives to work over the past several decades. 

No, after spending months, or maybe even years, running very complicated regressions that your simple mind could never possibly understand, Krueger would like for you to know that it"s the growing opioid epidemic that is forcing men to sit on their couches all day rather than look for work.  Here"s a summary of his findings from the Brookings Institute:

The increase in opioid prescriptions from 1999 to 2015 could account for about 20 percent of the observed decline in men’s labor force participation (LFP) during that same period.

In “Where have all the workers gone? An inquiry into the decline of the U.S. labor force participation rate” (PDF), Princeton University’s Alan Krueger examines the labor force implications of the opioid epidemic on a local and national level.

Among other findings, the research suggests that:

• Regional variation in opioid prescription rates across the U.S. is due in large part to differences in medical practices, rather than varying health conditions. Pain medication is more widely used in counties where health care professionals prescribe greater quantities of opioid medication, with a 10 percent increase in opioid prescriptions per capita is associated with a 2 percent increase in the share of individuals who report taking a pain medication on any given day. When accounting for individuals’ disability status, self-reported health, and demographic characteristics, the effect is cut roughly in half, but remains statistically significant.

• Over the last 15 years, LFP fell more in counties where more opioids were prescribed. Krueger reaches this conclusion by linking 2015 county-level opioid prescription rates to individual level labor force data in 1999-2001 and 2014-16. For more on the relationship between prescription rates and labor force participation rate on the county-level.

Krueger also provided this very helpful map proving that opioid abuse is highly correlated to unemployment.  Of course, it couldn"t possibly be the case that opioid abuse is the result of high unemployment and the associated depression that goes along with it...no, the opioid abuse definitely came first.

So, what is Krueger"s solution to help reverse the seemingly perpetual decline in labor force participation rates?  If you guessed "Obamacare" then you"re absolutely right...and unfortunately, no, that is not a joke...here is the excerpt from page 38 of Krueger"s paper:

Third, addressing the decades-long slide in labor force participation by prime age men should be a national priority. This group expresses low levels of SWB and reports finding relatively little meaning in their daily activities. Because nearly half of this group reported being in poor health, it may be possible for expanded health insurance coverage and preventative care under the Affordable Care Act to positively affect the health of prime age men going forward.

And while we would never presume to be smart enough to question the very thorough, impartial research of a Princeton economist, we do wonder whether it"s in any way relevant that labor force participation rates seemingly started to decline in 1965...

...at exactly the same time that welfare spending started to surge?

It"s probably just a coincidence.

Krueger"s full report can be reviewed here:

The Real Cause Of America&#039;s Opioid Epidemic

The Opioid epidemic is spreading across the heartland of America. The number of drug overdose deaths from both prescription (e.g., Oxycontin) and black market (e.g., heroin) opiates exceeded 30,000 in 2015. Initial estimates for 2016 indicate yet another new record of deaths. It is such an enormous problem that I taught a special class on it at our undergraduate instructional conference, Mises University, which you can listen to here.

Recently the Commission on Combating the Opioid Crisis issued a preliminary report and recommended that the president declare a national emergency.

From 2002 to 2015 the number of such deaths has increased by 280%. The chart below shows that prescription opiates were the main contributor from 2002 to 2011. Illicit opiates have been the main contributor since:

It is vitally important that we understand what is causing this epidemic and even more important, how do we solve it. Plus, we need to avoid becoming a victim of it. In the past, most people ignored the issue of drug overdoses as merely an urban “junkie” problem, but this epidemic is hitting ordinary Americans such as coal miners, teachers, and high school football players.

The Washington Post asserted that the problem arose because of “aggressive marketing” on the part of the pharmaceutical companies that sell opiate painkillers. Others on the left think it is an arbitrary explosion of demand. They make it sound like market failure, but the “aggressive marketing” was not slick TV commercials. Rather, the drug companies targeted doctors, not consumers. They provided many lucrative carrots to doctors and spent resources lobbying to change regulations and pain prescribing guidelines in order to rig the FDA/AMA system in their favor.

In terms of solutions, leftists advocate spending lots of more money on just about everything they can think of, especially drug addiction treatment programs, but such programs are both extremely expensive and ineffective.

Conservatives tend to think of the cause of the epidemic in terms of the evil Mexicans and Chinese, along with street dealers and drug gangs. The Trump administration thinks that building the Mexican wall will help. They have also advocated for policies that have been demonstrated to be failures, such as expanding minimum mandatory prison sentences and asset forfeiture programs. They think expanding the D.A.R.E. program will help solve the problem, but several government-sponsored reports have discredited the effectiveness of the Drug Awareness Resistance Education program.

The real cause of this epidemic is various government policies and the real solution is the dismantling of those same policies, in perpetuum.

The Four Causes

Let us start with drug prohibition which dates back to the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. Drug prohibition results in a black market where illegal products are not commercially produced and where suppliers are not constrained by the rule of law and product liability law. The result is that illegal drugs are more dangerous than legal drugs. Potency varies greatly from batch to batch and products often contain dangerous impurities and substitute ingredients. Opiate overdoses often occur when an addict is unaware that a particular dose is highly potent or contains Fentanyl, a pain medication that is 50 to a 1,000 times more potent than morphine.

The next cause is called the Iron Law of Prohibition, a phrase first used by Richard Cowan to describe the phenomenon that when drug law enforcement becomes more powerful, the potency of illegal drugs increases. One of the effects of enhancing prohibition enforcement is that suppliers will produce a higher potency drug. For example, during alcohol prohibition in the 1920s suppliers switched from producing beer and wine to highly potent spirits, such as gin and whiskey.

A second result of more rigorous prohibition enforcement is that suppliers will switch from lower potency drug types to higher potency drug types. For example, during Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs” during the 1980s, smugglers switched from bulky marijuana to highly concentrated cocaine and domestic suppliers turned much of this cocaine into crack cocaine, resulting in the crack cocaine epidemic. The Iron Law of Prohibition explains why we see more and more dangerous drugs on the black market and why we see decreases in overdoses in states that have legalized cannabis.

Government intervention in the economy is a largely unrecognized cause of addiction. Intervention has at least two distinct channels of creating addicts. The first is war. War creates addicts through both painful physical injuries and painful emotional and psychological disorders, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorders. The second cause is the general impact of widespread government intervention in the economy. Much of government interventionism results in the creation of privileges and monopoly power. For example, licensing requirements provide members of a profession, such as medical doctors, with monopoly profits by restricting the number of practicing physicians. This enriches licensed doctors and impoverishes potential doctors who must find work in another profession. These excess potential doctors thereby suppress wages in other labor markets. Given the pervasiveness of government intervention, this creates two classes in labor markets — the advantaged and the disadvantaged and addiction tends to develop in disadvantaged labor markets where people are more likely to be despondent and lack hope and economic resources.

The three above causes have been around for a long time creating the environment for drug overdoses, but at much lower levels than we see today.

The final cause has only been around for a couple of decades, but it is now responsible for the majority of deaths. Alluded to above, Big Pharma undertook “aggressive marketing” in order to encourage doctors to write massive numbers of prescriptions for opiate painkillers and to change to pain prescribing guidelines in order to sell more of these heroin-like pills.

As a result, doctors began prescribing drugs such as Oxycontin and Vicodin, which are similar to opiates, such as morphine and heroin, for ordinary injuries and minor surgeries. The problem with this is that if you take these pills for 30 or 60 days, there is a distinct possibility that you will become physically addicted to them. The doctor is not going to write you refills for the prescription once the injury has healed.

This leaves the addict with three bad choices.

One, you can enter a drug addiction rehabilitation program, but these programs are expensive and are not necessarily effective.

Two, you can go cold turkey. However, detoxification comes with a slew of physical and psychological symptoms and can result in suicide and death.

Three, you can go into the black market and buy illegal Oxycontin and Vicodin pills. The problem with this option is that such pills are expensive and have an unstable supply. What happens if you choose this option, but run low on money or have trouble acquiring the pills? Well, very often the drug dealer who sold you the pills can also sell you heroin or tell you where to buy it. Heroin is often cheaper per dose and has a more stable supply. This is how people who would never even consider entering a room in which heroin was present become heroin addicts. This process is what has caused the major surge in drug overdoses.

The solution to the epidemic is to legalize drugs. Doctors should be able to put their patients on drug maintenance and recovery programs. Commercially produced opiates would be pure and relatively safe. Addicts could go about their lives, attempting to recover physically, psychologically, socially, and economically without having to worry about how to obtain and pay for their drugs. Drug addiction is often a multi-faceted problem that simply cannot be fixed with a 30 day rehab experience. Addicts that are successfully detoxed, but without solving more basic problems, often relapse and die because the dose they take is now too strong for their detoxed body.

Legalizing cannabis would also be a key to solving the epidemic. Legal cannabis improves the epidemic through two channels. First, medical formulations of cannabis can be a potent, but non-addictive pain killer. Therefore, legalization leads to a reduced level of opiate use, abuse, and mortality and there are several peer-reviewed studies that confirm this. Second, because cannabis reduces pain and anxiety, and improves sleep and appetite it is very helpful for those who are trying to beat their heroin addiction.

The Opioid epidemic is killing more than 30,000 Americans a year. For most experts, the epidemic is a mystery with regard to its cause and solution. A little progress has been made, but to really eliminate the problem we need to legalize drugs, reduce the size of government, and increase freedom in our lives. We also need to find an answer for the pain epidemic which has shackled too many Americans to Big Pharma and the medical belief that every symptom requires another prescription!

Inside The Opioid Crisis That You&#039;re Not Allowed To See

Via StockBoardAsset.com,

Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions unveiled a plan to go after doctors and pharmacies suspected of healthcare fraud by oversubscribing opioids. America’s opioid epidemic killed 33,000 people in 2015 making it the worst drug crisis in our history. Last week, President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a national emergency allowing the executive branch to direct funds towards treatment facilities and supplying police officers with naloxone.

As a socio-economist on the front lines of the opioid crisis in Baltimore, Maryland, I am about to take you through an opioid experience like you’ve never seen before. We’re going to travel into the inner city of Baltimore and interview current and former addicts of opioids and heroin. Some of these individuals used heroin 15-minutes before the cameras started rolling.

These individuals have never been given the chance to tell their story until now. Baltimore’s mainstream news is not allowed to share this because it breaks the narrative that everything is awesome. It turns out that Baltimore could have the largest methadone clinic in the United States called Turning Point Clinic. Each of the interviewees are current and past patients of the clinic and speak very negatively about it. A similar description of Baltimore is heard from each of the interviewees of a hellacious city with decades of deindustrialization, drug abuse, and violent crime.

In the first video, three women who are current or past addicts of opioids tell the story of clinics, doctors, and pharmacies flooding the street of Baltimore with opioids. Gina mainly speaks about the Turning Point Clinic - how a preacher who operates the facility went from “nothing to now wearing $1000 gators, flying private jets, and driving Bentleys”. As described by one of the women, it looks like ‘zombie-land’ outside of the clinic.

In the second video, Gina speaks about her addiction to opioids and how she overcame the troubles through a strong-will. The next women to speak is Wanda, who is currently in pain management at Turning Point Clinic and speaks about how the opioid crisis is destroying America’s youth. I then ask the question about record number of homicides in Baltimore, and Wanda says opioids are a big part of that.

In the third video, ‘John Doe’ shot up on heroin 15-minutes before giving us the interview. He is an active patient at the Turning Point Clinic and describes it to be the largest methadone clinic in the United States with 6k-10k patients per day. The illegal activity and the corruption around this clinic is highlighted in the video via ‘John Doe’ statements, along with truth bombs that will not disappointment.

Conclusion

We now have an understanding that opioids are big business in the hood. You’re not allowed to know about this, because only a select few in our society are allowed to prosper from it. It’s unfortunate that drug trade is the most prevalent type of good flowing around low income areas across the United States. We wouldn’t expect nothing else after 50-years of deindustrialization and the bottom 90% of Americans left to rot.

America’s inner cities have to change or the collapse of an empire is on the horizon. Doesn’t help when 96 million Americans are out of the workforce.

Signs Of Distress

The world is edging closer to the final moments after which everything will be forever changed. Grand delusions, perpetuated over decades, will finally hit the limits of reality and collapse in on themselves.

We’re over-budget and have eaten deeply into the principal balances of all of our main trust accounts. We are ecologically overdrawn, financially insolvent, monetarily out past the Twilight Zone, consuming fossil fuels (as in literally eating them), and adding 80,000,000 net souls to the planet’s surface -- each year! -- without regard to the consequences.

Someday there will be hell to pay financially, economically, and ecologically as there simply isn’t any way to maintain these overdrafts forever. Reality does not renegotiate. Its deal terms aren"t compromisable.

For those who have the neural plasticity to actually see what"s happening around us, the changes are already here, blatant and frightening. Younger folks, with their fresher eyes and fewer ties to the past, can see them a lot easier than their elders.

The prosperity enjoyed by the past few generations -- especially the Baby Boomers -- was stolen from future generations. All the while, they pretended as if their borrowing-heavy standards of living were the result of sheer genius and intelligence; like trust fund babies who mistake being born on third base for hitting a triple.

Young people have sussed this out; and are now pulling back from many of the principal occupations of their forebears -- like marriage, babies and buying homes and cars. This perplexes older folks, who are beginning to find themselves increasingly at odds with the generations following after them.

Humans can be very very smart, but the flip-side of our ingenuity is our capacity for self-delusion. We’ve very consistently preferred to look past our faults. That can work for a while, but eventually an incomplete view will lead to a complete disaster. For example: depleting our topsoils today to grow more eventually leads to a collapse of our food system tomorrow. Similarly, increasing societal complexity ultimately drains the resources out of an empire, until it withers and fails. Such is what we can learn from history. Each of these examples is rooted in the self-delusion that today"s actions don"t have real consequences.

Monetary printing experiments like those currently being run by the world’s central banks are the ultimate form of self-delusion. Money is the most potent form of social communication, underlying all contracts and agreements. Violate those and literally everything falls apart, as we are seeing happen in real-time in Venezuela right now.

Money printing and its other historical debasement equivalents, serve to cover up (barely) critical signals. Derelict ideas that should die a quick death, instead, persist. Mis-priced money leads mal-investment (e.g., Italian junk debt selling with the same yield as ten year US Treasury debt!!). Extremely unfair redistributions of wealth from the bottom to the top result. Every. Single. Time. This time is no different.

If you cannot see this madness in the chart below, I strongly suggest you keep staring at it until you can. It shows the exploding balance sheet of the central bank of "the floating retirement colony" known as Japan:

The Japanese money printers have gone hog-wild over the past decade. And they"ve had company. The other major central banks of the wold have been printing $trillions and $trillions, too, over the same time period. What will the repercussions be? The world is about to find out.

But it’s actually far worse than that. For those who can bear to look, the signs of illness are as startlingly obvious as gangrene on a necrotic limb. Species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate. Glaciers are fast disappearing. Frogs and insect populations are mysteriously collapsing. Massive destruction of the landscape as we chase the last low-EROEI fuels remaining (tar sands, and shale wells). Miles-deep mining efforts. Enormous human migrations away from economically and ecologically ruined areas (see: the MENA region).

But the average citizen remains largely blind and/or numb to these. Again, much of this has to do with self-delusion that broken signals enable. People worry less as long as the stock markets are showing higher values, which is precisely why we don’t trust them anymore – they have become the most important signaling devices for The Powers That Be. They are far too important to leave to the vagaries of investors, and must be rescued/controlled/manipulated so that the “right” outcomes can be achieved.

If we’re lucky when these financial delusions finally break, we’ll hopefully avoid a global war. That’s the usual route by which the politicians and bankers seek to avoid having to be held accountable for the colossal mistakes they made in the past. They drag everyone to in a manufactured confrontation, whooping up the populace into a fever pitch by inventing hobgoblins -- exactly as has recently happened in the US with the recent rash of Russia-phobia; a case study in how easily public perception can be manipulated (as well as proof-positive that critical thinking skills are no longer requirements for today"s journalists).

But if we’re unlucky, war may destroy much of what we take for granted and hold dear. Living standards will drop. The veil covering today"s massive financial deception will be yanked off, revealing the shriveled, cold promises of past decades as being wholly incapable of meeting their obligation to fund millions of promised retirements.

And if we’re really unlucky, that war could involve some horrendous new weapons that could cripple our nation"s electrical grid (e.g., EMP, cyber attack). In which case, all of our individual attention and effort in the northern hemisphere will focus down to one simple task: surviving the first winter.

Signs Of Distress

In ways conscious and subconscious, we"re becoming aware of the signs of growing instability around us. Like a flock of sheep catching the scent of an unseen predator, right now we’re collectively becoming increasingly nervous and stressed. People’s tempers are short with each other, criticisms fly easily, and stances are becoming hardened to ludicrous levels.

Many don’t know why they"re unhappy. And because they"re unable to identify the source, they blame themselves. Instead of acting out, they act in.

Heavy drinking is on the rise:

More U.S. adults are drinking, and more heavily

Aug 9, 2017

The United States has a serious drinking problem. Since 2001, heavy drinking and alcohol use disorder have risen dramatically, according to a new study that surveyed tens of thousands of adults.The numbers reveal “a public health crisis,”the authors say.

The increases were especially large among those 65 years and older, minorities and women, researchers report online August 9 in JAMA Psychiatry. Alcohol is a risk factor for many potentially life-threatening injuries and health problems, including cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes and liver cirrhosis.

In 2012?2013, an estimated 29.6 million American adults reported high-risk drinking, up from 20.2 million in 2001?2002.

(Source)

Alcohol is not enough for some people. Their need to numb themselves to the bleak existence of their lives leads them to opioids, both legal and illegal:

Opioid Crisis: The Awful Arithmetic of America’s Overdoses May Have Gotten Worse

Aug 7, 2017

The deadly drug overdose epidemic that has been ravaging the nation may be even worse than we realize.

A new University of Virginia study says the numbers of deaths due to heroin and opioid overdoses have actually been severely underreported.

Dr. Christopher Ruhm revisited thousands of death certificates from 2008 through 2014 and concluded the mortality rates were 24 percent higher for opioids and 22 percent higher for heroin than had been previously reported.

Ruhm’s awful arithmetic emerged just days after the presidential opioid commission, led by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, urged President Donald Trump to “declare a national emergency” to deal with the crisis.

Nearly 35,000 people across America have died of heroin or opioid overdoses in 2015, according to theNational Institute on Drug Abuse.

(Source)

Records are being broken:

Opioid deaths in US break new record

Aug 8, 2017

The first nine months of 2016 saw a sharp increase in opioid drug overdoses in the US compared to the prior year, according to new data by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The government is struggling to respond to the crisis.

Deaths due to drug overdose peaked in the third quarter of last year – 19.7 cases for every 100,000 people, compared to 16.7 in the same period the year before,according to newly released numbers from the NCHS, which is part of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

(Source)

That is a startling rate of increase. 3/16.7 = 18% An 18% increase in one year is profound. What’s going on? We won’t go into the really dark side of this story which is that certain pharmaceutical companies make a ton of money off of addicted people, and those same companies donate a lot of money to the US political system. Suffice it to say that the worship of money and power is so profound that some activities of late cannot really be distinguished from those of a death cult.

For those who are not into opioids other avenues towards relieving the pain exist,

One in 6 Americans Take Antidepressants, Other Psychiatric Drugs

One in six Americans take some kind of psychiatric drugs — mostly antidepressants, researchers reported Monday.

They also found that twice as many white people take those drugs as do African-Americans or other minorities, and fewer than 5 percent of Asian-Americans do. And most people who take them are taking them long-term, Thomas Moore of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices in Alexandria, Virginia and colleagues found.

"Overall, 16.7 percent of 242 million U.S. adults reported filling one or more prescriptions for psychiatric drugs in 2013,” they wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Internal Medicine.

(Source)

If one in six Americans is being medicated for depression and/or anxiety, and another significant chunk are checking out via opioid numbing, perhaps we need to consider an alternative explanation for these facts: There’s something wrong with the world these people are inhabiting -- not with the people themselves.

Charles Eisenstein really caught my mind’s attention with a piece he wrote long ago entitled The Mutiny of the Soul. In it he argues that perhaps those most in need of medicinal help are actually those who are most attuned to the actual state of the world. He explains the rise in depression and anxiety like this:

The answer is staring us in the face. When our soul-body is saying No to life, through fatigue or depression, the first thing to ask is, "Is life as I am living it the right life for me right now?" When the soul-body is saying No to participation in the world, the first thing to ask is, "Does the world as it is presented me merit my full participation?"

What if there is something so fundamentally wrong with the world, the lives, and the way of being offered us, that withdrawal is the only sane response?

I have met countless people of great compassion and sensitivity, people who would describe themselves as "conscious" or "spiritual", who have battled with CFS, depression, thyroid deficiency, and so on. These are people who have come to a transition point in their lives where they become physically incapable of living the old life in the old world.

That is because, in fact, the world presented to us as normal and acceptable is anything but. It is a monstrosity. Ours is a planet in pain. If you need me to convince you of that, if you are unaware of the destruction of forests, oceans, wetlands, cultures, soil, health, beauty, dignity, and spirit that underlies the System we live in, then I have nothing to say to you. I only am speaking to you if you do believe that there is something deeply wrong with the way we are living on this planet.

So if you suffer from anxiety, maybe you don"t have a "disorder" at all — maybe the house is on fire. Anxiety is simply the emotion corresponding to "Something is dangerously wrong and I don"t know what it is." That is only a disorder if there is in fact nothing dangerously wrong. "Nothing is wrong, just you" is the message that any therapy gives when it tries to fix you.

I disagree with that message. The problem is not with you. You have very good reason to be anxious. Anxiety keeps part of your attention away from your tasks of polishing the silverware as the house burns down, of playing the violin as the Titanic sinks.

Unfortunately, the wrongness you are tapping into might be beyond the cognizance of the psychiatrists who treat you, who then conclude that the problem must be your brain.

(Source)

Does that all ring a bell of truth for you as it does for me? 

Perhaps the sanest response to being in a world that does not merit your full participation is to check out. Drinking, drugs, video games and Netflix binges (while not advised or endorsed) are much more understandable when viewed through this lens.

(Full disclosure, these past few years have not been easy on me, either. I prefer action and constructive motion, so the past few years have been like one of those dreams where you"re desperate to move but your body remains frozen in place. I’ve wanted things to finally come to a head so we can at least begin the process of acknowledging our predicaments and facing them head on. Beneath it all is my dread at the prospect that all these years of delaying and denying will amount to a larger and more painful correction when it comes.)

It really begs the question: What if there’s nothing wrong with the people who are anxious or depressed, but the exact opposite is true; those who are cheerful and chipper are missing the plot?

If you were an astronaut and your one-and-only spaceship was leaking oxygen into the infinite void of Space, would you medicate those expressing concern while rewarding those with positive attitudes and power drills who continue to punch more holes in the hull? Of course not. Why should we think any differently in the case of spaceship Earth?

The truth is that the lifestyle we"re living today is vastly distant from the one humans evolved to value. Sebastian Junger explained to us in a podcast that returning veterans commit suicide at the rate of 22 per day largely because they experience such "emptiness" upon reintegrating into civilian life. Unit cohesion in the military was so much more fulfilling and enriching that the prospect of a permanent return to what we call “US culture” leads many of them to conclude that suicide is the better option. If there"s a more damning indictment of the current culture in the US, I don’t know of it.

The data is clear: in the US, people are as unhappy, overmedicated and overweight than ever before.

Our society"s current plan is just not working. So why not square up to that reality, take charge and fix things while we still can? Why would we agree to persist in this dangerously broken state of affairs?

We, each of us and all of us, have the power to pursue a different path. A better path. We can and we should change everything that needs changing. We must rebel against this state of affairs, and withdraw our consent from a toxic system rather than let that system break us down.

The time for a quiet revolution has arrived. One that begins with, and within, you.

In Part 2: Joining The Quiet Revolution, we explain how the signs of distress detailed above can be used to add urgency in making investments in your life that will make you happier, healthier, more engaged, and prosperous -- both today and tomorrow. The data is telling us that from here, the extreme changes the world is experiencing will only accelerate.

Those who can see this and adapt will fare far better than those who cannot, will not, or won’t.

Some will thrive, some will survive, many will do neither.

Click here to read the report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

Fed Believes Opioid Crisis Is Reason Why Men Aren&#039;t Working

Bill Polacek runs a manufacturing company in Western Pennsylvania. Even though a glut in new construction projects has dried up work for tradesmen, Polacek said he struggled to find qualified welders a few years back when he had a large number of jobs to fill. Polacek interviewed 350 people to fill openings for 50 welders and machinists at his Johnstown, Pennsylvania-based manufacturing company. But he quickly found the number of qualified candidates dwindling to the point where the number of open jobs was higher than the applicants qualified to fill them. The reason? Too many of Polacek’s interviewees either had criminal histories, or couldn’t pass a drug test.

“"We weren’t attracting the right people," Polacek says of the episode, which prompted him to invest in extensive outreach to local high schools to build up a pipeline of workers.”

America’s worsening opioid crisis has helped create a generation of men whose struggles with addiction are preventing them from finding, and holding, steady jobs. Indeed, the type of hard-to-hire Americans Polacek encountered pose a growing problem for many employers, as a deepening opioid crisis plagues American communities just as the jobless rate hovers near a 16-year low. Polacek’s situation is hardly unique; the Fed’s Beige Book, a collection of anecdotes about the business climate collected by the 12 regional Fed banks, has included many testimonials about the difficulty that some employers, particularly manufacturing firms, are having in finding qualified workers, like this one from a manufacturing firm in St. Louis.

“Manufacturing contacts in Louisville and Memphis reported difficulties finding experienced or qualified employees, with some citing candidates’ inability to pass drug tests,” the St. Louis Fed reported in the July 12 Beige Book, a survey of regional economic conditions. Businesses have also raised the issue as a barrier to finding workers in conversations with Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker.

According to Bloomberg, the Federal Reserve has stumbled on an explanation for the phenomenon that Polacek experienced when he tried to hire those welders - a question that has stumped central bankers, policy wonks and academics: Why are so many working-age men are dropping out of the labor force?

Even though this trend started 40 years ago, the Fed says the opioid crisis is now contributing to the problem of shrinking prime-age labor-force participation. The seeds of the opioid crisis were planted in the 1990s as doctors liberally prescribed dangerous painkillers like Vicodin and Oxycontin. Today, 15%, or one in seven, men between 25 and 54 are inexplicably missing from the workforce, despite the unemployment rate purportedly declining to 4.4% in June.

The opioid crisis began in earnest around the beginning of Obama’s first term in office, as deaths from drug overdoses started to climb. Now, after recording nearly 60,000 drug-related deaths last year, drugs are the biggest killer of prime-age Americans. America has more drug overdose deaths than any other developed country. Many of these deaths are caused by dangerous synthetic opioid analogues like fentanyl and carfentanil, the latter of which is 100% stronger than morphine.

And it’s not just Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen, who was asked several questions about opioids during her testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last week, who’s trying to connect the dots between opioids and the surfeit of unemployable, shiftless young men: At the Cleveland Fed’s summit, talk about the crisis wasn’t reserved for the opioid-specific panel: it came up throughout the other sessions, according to Bloomberg.

“It’s an economic issue. It has economic implications, but it’s a whole lot more than that,” Petrus said. “It’s cross-cutting.”

Many other notable academics, including Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton, have published economic research about opioids.

The Boston Fed published research in September on the link between local economic despair and opioid use in New England. Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton suggested in their work on rising middle-age mortality among the white working class that the breakdown of traditional economic and social structures have probably contributed to a step up in overdose, alcoholism and suicide.

During her Senate testimony, Yellen explained that opioids were one cause of the drop in prime-age labor force participation, along with increasing automation and outsourcing by manufacturers. However, Yellen says she doesn’t understand whether widespread opioid abuse is a symptom of the “long running maladies” these workers have faced, or the cause.

“There seems to be a clear indication or a clear connection between this and the ability to go to a job,” said Senator Joe Donnelly, to which Yellen agreed.

Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse asked Yellen whether mid-career job retraining opportunities might alleviate the problem, as technological innovation forces Americans in certain industries to acquire new skills or be replaced by a machine.

“The individuals who’ve lost those jobs have found it difficult to acquire the skills necessary to re-enter the labor market and many individuals who don’t have the education are struggling to find jobs,” Yellen said, in response.

But while mid-career job retraining sounds plausible – it is a concrete, if wonkish, policy, there’s a broader problem with the labor force that narrowly applicable, resource-intensive “solutions” like these are missing. And that’s the fact that, fundamentally, the number of well-paying jobs available for everyone except the supremely well-educated is shrinking rapidly. Meanwhile, the financial circumstances for the average millennial are much more precarious. Indeed, failure to launch a career during the early years can leave a negative impact for years to come.

While it’s nice to think about, the “everybody should just learn to code” policy won’t fix any of these deeply entrenched problems in the US labor market – and it certainly won’t convince anyone to stop using drugs.
 

U.S. Cocaine Seizures Are Going Through The Roof

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has almost doubled the amount of cocaine seized this fiscal year compared to the year before.

You will find more statistics at Statista

As Statista"s Dyfed Loesche notes, more than two months before this fiscal year ends on September 30 the agency has seized more than 121,000 million pounds of cocaine.

As our infographic shows, this year the greater share was seized by the biggest CBP branch, the Office of Field Operations. This arm of CBP mans all 328 ports of entry (seaports, airports, border crossings etc.) while Border Patrol officer operate out in the open between those ports.

Colombia Produces Record Cocaine Crop For 2nd Straight Year

We didn’t need any more data to definitively expose the many shortcomings of the US-led global prohibition on narcotics – but we got one today, courtesy of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

New figures show that cocaine production in Colombia reached an all-time high for the second straight year in 2016, as coca cultivation in the South American country surged 52 percent, spanning 146,000 hectares, compared with 96,000 in 2015. The 2016 crops produced an estimated 866 metric tons of cocaine, an increase of 35 percent compared to 2015. Meanwhile, cocaine use appears to be increasing in the two largest markets, North America and Europe.

While the UNODC said the survey results were “disappointing,” it noted that there were “some positives” in the report, including an increase of 49 per cent in seizures of cocaine - from 253 tons confiscated in 2015 to 378 tons in 2016. Of course, each seizure inevitably means some low-level trafficker – possibly working under the threat of violence – is being jailed, at an enormous cost to the public, while the seizure has little impact on the larger organization.

The rise in production comes as FARC, a communist insurgency that controlled patches of the Colombian countryside for more than 50 years, renounced drug trafficking under the terms of a peace agreement that was ratified by Colombia’s Congress in November. The group started disarming in March, but doubts remain: Can the group’s members will be able to work regular jobs. Meanwhile, FARC, which  once supported itself mainly through selling drugs and kidnapping wealthy individuals, is transforming into a political party.

In any event, one Colombian law enforcement official who spoke with the Guardian sounded optimistic about the country’s ability to work with FARC to reduce coca production.

“José Ángel Mendoza, the head of Colombia’s counter-narcotics police, said Colombia faced “a difficult historical moment”, but stressed that the figures reflected the state of the country on 31 December 2016.

Since then, the government has put in place an ambitious plan to eradicate 100,000 hectares of coca by the year’s end. Half of that amount is to be forcibly eradicated, and the other half removed through crop substitution agreements with coca farmers.

The substitution program is part of a peace deal with Farc rebels, who renounced drug trafficking as part of their demobilization deal. During much of the group’s 53 years as an armed insurgency, it financed its fight through the drug trade.

Former combatants have committed to work with the government to convince farmers to replace coca crops with another way to make a living.”

This forced eradication program is already yielding results, the Colombians say.

“Already 40% of the goal of forced eradication has been met, and 86,000 families – who account for as much as 76,000 hectares of coca – have signed on to crop substitution programs in exchange for subsidies of about $11,000 per farmer over the course of two years, according to the government.”

As VICE noted, at a joint press conference in May, President Trump pushed for Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos to increase eradication efforts. Santos won the Nobel peace prize late last year for his work on the FARC deal.

Trump said Colombia is one of the US’s closest allies “in the hemisphere,” before reaffirming US support for destroying cocaine crops and refineries by providing DEA personnel and resources to augment localized eradication efforts.

“We have a problem with drugs and you have a very big problem with drugs,” Trump reminded Santos.

“Recently, we have seen an alarmed — and I mean really a very highly alarmed and alarming trend,” Trump said. “Last year, Colombia coca cultivation and cocaine production reached a record high, which, hopefully, will be remedied very quickly by the President.  We must confront this dangerous threat to our societies together.”

Trump has said he believes his wall will help keep drugs out of the US ("walls work, just ask Israel"). Unfortunately, Trump and the Republicans" plans for reducing the flow of illegal narcotics are no different from their predecessors. Once FARC has left the countryside, a new criminal group will take its place – an organization possibly more violent and unpredictable than the one that preceded it. Indeed, as long is there is demand, somebody will find a way to meet it. Maybe it"s time for governments to acknowledge that prohibition has failed, and that regulation could be a more productive strategy.

To be fair, if Santos does manage to engineer a sharp drop in Colombia’s cocaine exports with his voluntary crop-rotation plan, he might earn a Nobel Prize in economics, too.  
 

Tennessee Counties Sue Opioid Makers Using Local "Crack Tax" Law

The US opioid epidemic has continued to worsen in 2017 as super-powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil taint the nation’s heroin supply. While the FBI’s final tally has yet to arrive, preliminary data suggest that overdose deaths last year eclipsed the 50,000 recorded nationally in 2015 – the most ever. And the body count is expected to be even higher in 2017. As the death toll in some of the hardest-hit areas of the country skyrockets - in some cases forcing county coroners to build larger freezers to store the bodies – states have begun filing lawsuits against the pharmaceutical companies responsible for making and marketing opioid painkillers, in hopes of offsetting the ballooning public-health costs that have been a byproduct of the crisis.

Three Tennessee district attorneys are the latest prosecutors to file suit against the drug makers, joining a group that includes the attorneys general of Ohio, Illinois, Mississippi, New York and Santa Clara and Orange County in California – not to mention the Cherokee Nation. But the Tennessee prosecutors" approach differs from their peers in one unique way:

They are suing under the state’s long-ridiculed and rarely used “crack tax” law, which would hold Big Pharma liable for damages as if they were street-level drug dealers, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported.

While the companies targeted by individual states differ, prosecutors are all alleging similar misconduct: That the pharmaceutical companies leaned on researchers to play down the drugs’ addictive qualities, while spending millions on marketing them to both patients and doctors.

Another lawsuit filed in Washington in January alleged that Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, was aware of the drug’s immense popularity on the streets, but did nothing to curb its distribution.

The suit also names a “Baby Doe” as a plaintiff. “Baby Doe,” the News Sentinel reports, is a boy born in March 2015 addicted to opiates because his mother, identified as “Mary Doe,” was an opiate addict and bought her drugs in Sullivan County, one of the three judicial districts represented in the legal action.

Filed on behalf of the three prosecutors and Baby Doe by Nashville law firm Branstetter, Stranch and Jennings, the lawsuit spends dozens of pages detailing publicly available accounts of alleged fraud and deceptive marketing practices by opiate manufacturers.

“It is now beyond reasonable question that the manufacturer defendants’ fraud caused Mary Doe and thousands of others in Tennessee to become addicted to opioids — an addiction that, thanks to their fraudulent conduct, was all but certain to occur,” the lawsuit stated.

Tennessee logs more opiate prescriptions per capita than every state in the nation except West Virginia, the News Sentinel reported. Sullivan County is considered an epicenter, so much so its law enforcement agencies snared their own reality television shows. Shelby County in West Tennessee is also considering joining the lawsuit.

Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III issued a statement Tuesday in which he said his office is investigating the state"s options in pursuing its own legal action.

"Our objective is to identify and hold accountable the parties responsible for this opioid epidemic," the statement read.

That “crack tax” – otherwise known as the drug dealer liability statute - was passed in 2005 to allow for civil action against street drug dealers, many of whom were peddling crack.

However, since police typically seize convicted drug dealers’ profits under criminal and civil forfeiture laws – and since most drug dealers go to prison after they’re arrested – there was rarely anything left to be claimed in civil court.

But unlike street dealers, pharma firms are flush with cash. Purdue has annual sales of nearly $3 billion, while Mallinckrodt and Endo also rack up billions each year from sales of opiate drugs.

Many legal experts have said that the current batch of lawsuits resembles the 1998 settlement between the four largest US tobacco companies – Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, Brown & Williamson and Lorillard – and 46 states attorneys general. In accordance with that judgment, the tobacco companies agreed to pay out more than $200 billion through 2025, with payments to be made in perpetuity.

While states are no doubt in need of financial resources to offset the public-health costs they’re forced to absorb because of the epidemic, pharmaceutical companies have at least one strategy to legally deflect blame: If the showdown ever makes it to trial, defense attorneys will try to slough off as much blame as possible on the overprescribing doctors, like one elderly physician who was arrested earlier this month in New York City and charged with needlessly prescribing millions of pills. 

Drug Overdoses Now The Leading Killer Of American Adults Under 50

The opioid crisis that is ravaging urban and suburban communities across the US claimed an unprecedented 59,000 lives last year, according to preliminary data gathered by the New York Times. If accurate, that’s equivalent to a roughly 19% increase over the approximately 52,000 overdose deaths recorded in 2015, the NYT reported last year.

Overdoses, made increasingly common by the introduction of fentanyl and other powerful synthetic opioids into the heroin supply, are now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. And all evidence suggests the problem has continued to worsen in 2017. One coroner in Western Pennsylvania told a local newspaper that his office is literally running out of room to store the bodies, and that it was recently forced to buy a larger freezer.

The initial data points to large increases in these types of deaths in states along the East Coast, particularly Maryland, Florida, Pennsylvania and Maine. In Ohio, which filed a lawsuit last week accusing five drug companies of abetting the opioid epidemic, the Times estimated that overdose deaths increased by more than 25 percent in 2016.

In some Ohio counties, deaths from heroin have virtually disappeared. Instead, the primary culprit is fentanyl or one of its many analogues. In Montgomery County, home to Dayton, of the 100 drug overdose deaths recorded in January and February, only three people tested positive for heroin; 97 tested positive for fentanyl or another analogue.

In some states in the western half of the US, data suggest deaths may have leveled off for the time being - or even begun to decline. Experts believe that the heroin supply west of the Mississippi River, traditionally dominated by a variant of the drug known as black tar which is smuggled over the border from Mexico, isn"t as easily adulterated with lethal analogues as the powder that"s common on the East Coast.

First responders are finding that, with fentanyl, carfentanil and the other analogues, overdoses can be so severe that multiple shots of naloxone - the anti-overdose medication that often goes by the brand name Narcan - are needed to revive people. One EMT in Warren County, Ohio told the Times that sometimes as many as 14 doses of Narcan are needed to revive a patient.

“It’s like a squirt gun in a house fire,” the EMT said.

But, as Robert Anderson, chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch of the National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC explains, toxicology results, which are necessary to assign a cause of death, can take three to six months or longer.

“It’s frustrating, because we really do want to track this stuff,” he said.

While the process in each state varies slightly, death certificates are usually first filled out by a coroner, medical examiner or attending physician. These death certificates are then collected by state health departments and sent to the N.C.H.S., which assigns what’s called an ICD-10 code to each death. This code specifies the underlying cause of death, and it’s what determines whether a death is classified as a drug overdose, the NYT reported.

We can say with confidence that drug deaths rose a great deal in 2016, but it is hard to say precisely how many died or in which places drug deaths rose most steeply. Because of the delay associated with toxicology reports and inconsistencies in the reported data, our estimate could vary from the true number by several thousand.