THEODORE DALRYMPLE ON OPIODS IN AMERICA: Signs and Symptoms of Malfeasance.
Last year, 49,000 Americans died of opioid overdose, or (more accurately) opioid-related overdose, since in most cases the opioids were taken in conjunction with other drugs. The opioids were the necessary, if not the sufficient, cause of death, for the other drugs, easily available with or without prescription, would not have caused death if taken on their own. It is therefore reasonable to ascribe the 49,000 deaths to opioids. Since 1999, 350,000 Americans have died of such overdoses.
American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts is an account of this disaster by the Guardian newspaper’s Washington correspondent, Chris McGreal, with a special focus on West Virginia, one of the states most affected by the epidemic. Indeed, the author takes West Virginia as a microcosm of the United States, the more readily comprehensible due to its small population.
The book is ill-written, reading like an extended but not very carefully crafted newspaper article in the weekend supplement of a serious newspaper. But it is nevertheless interesting both in what it says and what it omits to say.
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However, underlying this book is an Animal Farm mentality: that is to say, four legs good, two legs bad. Those with two legs—the manufacturers, the wholesalers, the doctors, the licensing authorities—are bad, while those with four legs, the people who actually took the drugs, are good. What the author does not see is that this attitude dehumanizes the victims completely, even if his two-legged people were as bad as he says they were (and as I think they were).
Over and over again, McGreal denies any personal responsibility to the people who took the drugs. He regards addiction straightforwardly as an illness, something that strikes in the same way as, say, Parkinson’s disease. (This is the line peddled by the egregious National Institute on Drug Abuse, the federal institution that somehow managed to congratulate itself on its successes and increase its funding while hundreds of thousands died on its watch, an absurdity beyond the range of satire.)
Read the whole thing.