[pjc50]

My own preferred hypothesis is that this is the result of despair: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/joblessne...

Someone will no doubt reply that US unemployment is falling, and therefore so should the opiates crisis, but it's not a simple matter of economics and statistics, it's a question of what people believe about the world and their future in it. Someone who gets a bad, painful job with no agency or fulfilment will vanish from the unemployment stats but the despair remains.

(Mind you, both for-profit heathcare and a punitive, moralist approach to pain relief belong in the blame picture as well)

[Someguywhatever]

>My own preferred hypothesis is that this is the result of despair

I agree with you, I would also throw in nihilism and purposelessness, the general lack of vision for the future from government and elites.

[prolikewh0a]

It's an easy out to the reality a lot of people with no economic success or vision for their future because of economic circumstances. The country is really not great for a whole lot of people. 50% of the entire population is poor or low income [1].

[1] https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Poverty-...

[adventured]

Manufacturing jobs are booming in the US. The very people that you're implying are hopeless, that specific demographic, have access to blue collar jobs in a way they haven't in nearly a generation. The US hasn't seen this kind of sustained manufacturing job growth since the mid 1990s.

The US has drug problems, and has for 50 years, that other first or second tier nations in worse structural condition never picked up. This goes all the way back to peak US economics of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the US had a standard of living that it has taken the best European nations 50 years to catch up to. The opioid crisis is the latest extension of the US being a drug abusing nation, which it has been for a very long time, even at the peak of US economic success when it had 1/2 of all global manufacturing. It has had multiple heroin waves, multiple cocaine craze waves, multiple pill abusing waves.

The people of Spain didn't overdose at 2x or 4x the rate of the US despite having a drastically worse economic situation. Their economic desperation is still far beyond that of the US.

The standard response to that is: yeah, but the US doesn't have a welfare state. Yes it does, it has a massive welfare state, and its welfare spending as a percentage of GDP is higher than Canada or Australia.

The opioid problem has particularly hit poorer Americans. Why aren't Bulgarians or Moldovans overdosing at far higher numbers? They're radically poorer. Part of this equation is access: Americans have massive, low cost, easy access to all the drugs. People in the US have an almost unique position in the world in regards to having enough money, easy access and combining it with the way drugs get pushed to Americans.

Some of this is in fact unique to the US and doesn't require there be a particular high level of stress.

Every economic metric indicates Americans are doing better today than they were seven years ago, and yet the opioid crisis isn't receding and it's far worse than it was seven years ago.

Japan has lost a minimum of 1/3 of its standard of living in 15-20 years. They're not overdosing on opioids like people in the US are. They've suffered far worse than people in the US have.

Every culture behaves differently under stress, there's no question about that. There's also zero evidence that the on-going opioid crisis is a result of active high level desperation. That's where it started; those are not the same things.

Do people in Sweden and Belgium commit suicide at higher rates than people in the US, because their standard of living is collapsing? Belgium's suicide rate is nearly 100% higher today than the US rate was in the year 2000. Does wealthy Europe have among the highest rates of suicide on earth because it's so terrible there and they're under incredible economic stress? Or is it more likely these cultural issue are in fact complex rather than simple.

[rgbrenner]

Manufacturing jobs are booming in the US. The very people that you're implying are hopeless, that specific demographic, have access to blue collar jobs in a way they haven't in nearly a generation.

It hasn't been a generation since the 2008 recession.. and there are still over 1 million fewer manufacturing jobs today than in 2008.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP

Since the low point, the industry has only added about 1 million jobs.. so they're only about 50% recovered by this stat.

[lazerpants]

>Japan has lost a minimum of 1/3 of its standard of living in 15-20 years. They're not overdosing on opioids like people in the US are. They've suffered far worse than people in the US have.

This seems patently false to me and strikes me as a way to bolster your "Americans are druggies" argument without any real evidence. FYI, GDP per capita in Japan is about the same as it has been for the past 20 years, despite a falling population.

[tafda]

Proof the claim Japan has lost 1/3 its standard of living in the past two decades is completely false:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDJPN

Visit Japan sometime. The Japanese clearly have a standard of living that is among the best in the world.

[jeffreyrogers]

If that GDP per capita isn't adjusted for inflation then living standards would probably have fallen by about 1/3.

[pjc50]

This is a reply to my "it's not a simple matter of economics and statistics"?

> Or is it more likely these cultural issue are in fact complex rather than simple

Yes, I'd agree with that. I said it was a "question of what people believe about the world and their future in it", which goes beyond the economic.

I don't think all these drug overdose deaths are counted in the plain definition of suicide, but they're clearly a manifestation of self-destructive behaviour.

[aedron]

A nitpick:

> Does wealthy Europe have among the highest rates of suicide on earth

Certainly not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

Only your two examples are in the somewhat upper bound of that list, the rest of Europe are among the lowest suicide per capita countries in the world.

[freeflight]

> This goes all the way back to peak US economics of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the US had a standard of living that it has taken the best European nations 50 years to catch up to.

So the "best European nations" will have reached a living standard, like the US of 60/70s, by the year 2020?

I mean, I'm not even convinced the US currently is anywhere near the standard it had back then, so that claim sounds a bit bold.

Could you quantify that in any way? The UN's Human Development Index could be of great help for that, sadly they only started doing that since 1990. So how are you measuring "standard of living"?

[ams6110]

> US unemployment is falling, and therefore so should the opiates crisis

For most people, once addicted, it's very difficult to stop. It's no longer about numbing your despair, it's a physical dependency with very unpleasant withdrawal symptoms.

[netsharc]

I mean, Trump is here because of despair too. Hillary promised "more of Obama", and the desperate people not benefiting from the roaring markets thought "I've been in misery for the past x years, she's promising more of that, the other guy is saying 'change', he might be full of shit, but what if he strikes it lucky, who do I pick, more of the same, or a chance of my life improving?".

Which is also why it was ridiculous that Trump (and his base) celebrated the latest GDP numbers, when on the ground the people were still suffering. And then we have Amazon, Uber, etc, "jobs"...

[i_feel_great]

> I mean, Trump is here because of despair too. Hillary promised "more of Obama", and the desperate people not benefiting from the roaring markets thought "I've been in misery for the past x years, she's promising more of that, the other guy is saying 'change', he might be full of shit, but what if he strikes it lucky, who do I pick, more of the same, or a chance of my life improving?".

Damn this is a sad comment. You ruined my night tonight.