I went to see Sam Quinones’ Dreamland lecture last night, and I thought it was interesting. The biggest thing that struck me was that Mr. Quinones wanted to use the government to stop the opioid epidemic but also acknowledged briefly that the government has utterly failed in the war on drugs and has only succeeded in locking up as many people as it can. That was very incongruous, but that’s not what I want to talk about. More important was the hype that Quinones’ has stirred up over the opioid epidemic with its effect on thousands of people across the globe. However, Quinones makes money by selling the idea that the opioid epidemic is the end all be all, but there are many more deadly epidemics out there that kill many more people and that perhaps we should be much more concerned about. Opioids killed 49,068 people in the US in 2017 according to the National Institutes of Health. That’s a lot of people that didn’t need to die. However, according to the World Health Organization, 4.3 million people die each year as a result of indoor air pollution from inhaling the smoke from their cooking fires. That’s more than 87 times the number of deaths from opioids in the US, and it is a very easy problem to fix; simply buy the global poor cheap electric cooking stoves. Drug rehabilitation is much more expensive due to its heavy use of the most valuable resource known to humanity, our time. The time of counselors, therapists, doctors, nurses, and the patient are all very expensive resources to purchase. If you still care more about the opioid epidemic, how do you feel about malaria? According to the WHO, malaria killed 445,000 people worldwide in 2016, nine times the number of people who died in the US from opioids. The solution to malaria is even cheaper, with malaria nets costing only 5 dollars each on average. While Quinones would like us all to believe that what he wrote his book about is America’s most pressing issue, we should think critically about problems that might not be as interesting as blaming the evil pharmaceutical industry and hotshot doctors for humanity’s biggest problems.
Rose Scholars Fall 2018
Endless possibilities
I think you raise a really important point in this post. I think America can too often fall into short-lived obsessions about certain problems, letting equally, if not more, harmful problems fall out of focus. Problematically, I think that too often the problems that become America’s short-lived obsessions are those that impact people in advantaged positions in society. Quinones, for example, emphasized how now the opioid epidemic is devastating families in affluent suburbs, and his emphasis on using a revival of community to counteract the opioid crisis seems to be a solution that addresses the causes of the crisis’ existence in advantaged communities but not in disadvantaged communities.