Opioids

In Europe at the end of the Noughties, the problem drug was krokodil. The semi-synthetic, necrosis-causing alternative to heroin was cheap. My father favoured it so much before his death that he started importing it from eastern Europe into Wales. Across the pond right now, the problem drug is fentanyl, which has made its way into much of the US drug supply. Indeed, it’s become so synonymous with death that many casual users have given up the bag all together (‘I love a line, but I’m not going to die for it,’ one Manhattanite told me recently). More than 75,000 Americans died from synthetic opioids in 2022. And now the opioids crisis has arrived in Wales.

More than two decades into America’s catastrophic opioid epidemic, the demographics of this unprecedented tragedy are clear. By far, the brunt of the harm has been borne by America’s poor and working classes. Multiple studies show a strong correlation between lack of employment, economic distress and overdose fatalities. Indeed, a 2021 study by the National Academy of Sciences concluded most of the decline in life expectancy beginning in the mid-1990s among working-age men and women was attributable to drug poisonings of people with a high school education or less. Standing in sharp relief to portraits of its primary victims are its perpetrators. Those most responsible for this epidemic are part of America’s best educated and economically privileged classes.

In rural upstate New York, where I grew up, pot-smoking was disproportionately a sport of farmers’ kids. That’s because inequitable ownership of land meant that some people could grow weed more discreetly than others. Among those with acres to till, private oases of marijuana were easily created by their offspring out of sight — especially, I recall, in between tall rows of feed corn. And with easier access to the drug, the sons and daughters of farmers also seemed to smoke more of it than the kids who were forced to rely on retail. This brings us to a paradox that, while not exactly one of Zeno’s, amounted to my earliest intuition of a chicken-and-egg problem.

If you were concerned about ‘white death’ you can rest easy. Newsweekis here to tell us that the rise in white mortality is due to white people not knowing how fortunate they are. You think I’m kidding? The article proclaims that new research has found the ‘anxiety of whites’ is based on ‘a misperception that their dominant status in society is being threatened, which is manifesting in multiple forms of psychological and physiological stress.’ What a relief! And what poor tools. If only we could emphasize to them that their perceived loss of status is based on misperception, they could stop taking fentanyl. The research has been conducted by Arjumand Siddiqi and her colleagues from the University of Toronto.