Honestly I don’t know what’s going on in the USA. You’re so proud of your “democracy and freedom” yet one of your 2 political parties is able to effectively dismantle the entire thing in less than a decade. You’re now one election away from being a christofascist state.
…and yet you’re all just going to work tomorrow. You’re all doing pretty much nothing except “make sure you vote in 2024.” So I guess every 4 years you’re going to be one election away from a literal Nazi takeover?
I don’t know. Riot or something. I have no idea how you’re all coping so hard.
Not to mention a large part of the population being addicted to legal opioids.
In Europe people take just a paracetamol or ibuprofen if they have a headache or sore muscle or something like that. In the US a lot of people take stuff like oxycodone (OxyCotin) or hydrocodone (Vicodin), for even simple pains.
These drugs make the whole going to shit thing a bit easier to handle whilst at the same time contributing to it.
Well, you need a prescription for those, so people do take lots of tylenol (aka acetaminophen, aka paracetamol) or ibuprofen. The problem is, it’s too easy to get prescription for opioids, and they get prescribed for relatively little things (but not for just e.g. a headache).
That said, I feel things are changing, people and authorities are openly admitting we have a opioid crisis, and there’s more awareness of the risks, which makes me think (hope) that doctors will be a bit more concerned before prescribing them. That said, I never got prescribed one, and probably won’t use them if I did.
Yes. This is the result of a privatized health system where the only outcome that matters is profit. Doctors write enough opioid prescriptions each year for 46% of Americans to receive one. (Source: https://drugabusestatistics.org/opioid-epidemic/)
It’s absolute madness, but I do think the prescribing is getting better slowly. Unfortunately, the massive jumps in ODs seem very related to fentanyl taking over an illicit drug market that used to be primarily heroin and rx opiates. When I worked on national drug use surveys ~8 years ago, fentanyl was not a part of the landscape at all. Things have changed so quickly.