TedaToubou

TedaToubou here: I generally agree with John and Julie and Darren as well. This will take a lot of discussion and outrages by the public media (and a few by hollywood of course) before we see any results.

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i actually really like this question. i'm curious to know how America may or may not be turning into a culture that's over reliant on prescribing medication...there's probably a lot more than a simple answer though. I'm guessing its a little bit of culture and a bit from influence by the pharmaceutical lobbies/companies. i actually read somewhere recently on r/bestof where a redditor explained the contribution of the government on making the opioid crisis worse through regulations on removing certain drugs that forced sellers to find a new market in different opoids like fentanyl.

EDIT:

found the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/9gfuqj/ufurdterguson27_explains_the_governments_role_in/?ref=share&ref_source=link

As a former heroin addict it kind of bugs me that people are still blaming the pharmaceutical companies.

They 100% played a big role in creating the opioid epidemic, but at this point it’s out of their hands. It seems like they’ve just become a convenient scapegoat for a government that isn’t doing NEARLY enough to help its citizens.

Back in the 2000’s, oxy was cheap and it was everywhere. The government realized this and started cracking down. By the early 2010’s, only a fraction of the amount of pills remained on the streets, and the price had more than doubled. It was as much as $40 a pill where I was.

On top of that, good luck getting opioids from a doctor, even if you have a legitimate medical condition.

So what do all of these people who’ve become hooked on painkillers do when the supply dwindles and price skyrockets? Move to the cheaper alternative.

And it’s important to note here: literally none of the heroin addicts I know started using heroin because they wanted to. None of them would have moved from pills to heroin if it wasn’t for the government’s restrictions on opioids. But when you’re withdrawing from opioids, anything that can offer you some relief is a god send. It became the only option for a lot of people.

So the heroin market skyrockets. At the same time, fentanyl analogues become available over the internet from labs in Mexico and China. These analogues are ~100x more potent than heroin at a fraction of the price, and you can have them delivered right to your door.

Dope boys realize that they can literally make 10000x more profit cutting their dope with fentanyl, and eventually start selling exclusively fentanyl and passing it off as heroin. That’s just basic capitalism. This obviously leads to a lot of deaths.

So essentially, the government tried to fix what was really a minor issue and fucking blew it up to the point where it is now.

Big pharma’s influence on the opioid crisis has been more or less rendered obsolete for almost 10 years now, and people would still rather blame them than a government that has done nothing but make things worse.

Big pharma could literally hand out prescription painkillers on the streets and it would be an improvement on the situation. And I mean that wholeheartedly. Pills are infinitely more safe than heroin. If they had stayed cheap and accessible, not nearly as many people would have started using heroin and everyone would have been better off.

TLDR: People like painkillers. Government takes them away and replaces them with extremely potent and deadly fentanyl analogues. People die. In lieu of making any effort to help the people that they fucked over with better resources for addicts etc, the government just blames big pharma.

not really privacy related but i'll bite, would you rather fight 100...just kidding.

I recently heard Andrew Ng analogize (probably not a real word) computer language to how just like in our human history when priests would be the only individuals versed in written language and the rest of the population would listen and absorb. The world changed once literacy reached to the main population. He theorized that similarly, we'll get to the a point where everyone should eventually have a basic understanding of some computer language and that'll also, create a large shift in society (maybe not now but decades later) when technology becomes more and more infused into everyday life.

What are your thoughts on this as an academic professional?

a bit from influence by the pharmaceutical lobbies/companies

are you stupid? do you just read the first sentence and respond?