Why is the Opioid Epidemic Hitting Rural America Particularly Hard? (drug, solutions)
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In general, many of the rural people that went to college and earned a degree left the rural community and joined the urban community (wife and I are examples). So you have a situation like in Seattle where the majority have a degree and job opportunities in the knowledge economy. The rural people that didn't get educated have been left behind (again that's a generalization that doesn't apply to many rural people who are doing quite well).
If we stipulate the above, are we not right then and there admitting that the rural communities are at substantial disadvantage? I am thinking in particular of the currently ongoing thread, of rural vs. urban tension.
People who have more formal education, will have a mindset and world-view and values, that differ from those who have less formal education. This difference in attitudes and lifestyles is substantial, and comes as a passel of ideas, pitting the one group against the other, on opposite sides. I have no doubt, that if we had a strong national trend of highly educated people (regardless of their provenance) moving to the countryside, and rural people who do pursue an advanced education returning to the countryside, that the rural vs. urban tensions would not be a stark.
If we stipulate the above, are we not right then and there admitting that the rural communities are at substantial disadvantage? I am thinking in particular of the currently ongoing thread, of rural vs. urban tension.
People who have more formal education, will have a mindset and world-view and values, that differ from those who have less formal education. This difference in attitudes and lifestyles is substantial, and comes as a passel of ideas, pitting the one group against the other, on opposite sides. I have no doubt, that if we had a strong national trend of highly educated people (regardless of their provenance) moving to the countryside, and rural people who do pursue an advanced education returning to the countryside, that the rural vs. urban tensions would not be a stark.
True. I see this alot when I run into old classmates from high school vs classmates from college.
I went to middle school and high school in an exurban area. Basically, rural area with suburban growth coming from Atlanta. There was a big difference between the persons born and raised there, and the persons who moved there from somewhere else. Difference in expectation, attitude, outlook on life. I was among those who moved to the area as part of the suburban growth. I couldn't relate to many of the persons there. I came from a college-educated home. I was a bookworm. My outlook on life was different.
I hear from my high school classmates, and most of them had children before age 27. My classmates from college waited a bit longer to have children. I think about the ones who didn't go to college. Many started having children when they were 20, 21 years old. I'm 31 and I'm not married, nor do I have children. Granted, most of my college-educated classmates have kids. However, they had them later than those who didn't go to college. The ones who didn't go to college did have a different outlook. I can't really describe it other than, well, more set in certain ways. Many of said persons I've had a harder time relating to.
I'm like a broken record when it comes to this book, but if you want to understand the opioid epidemic in America and the connection between prescription pain drugs and heroin, read Dreamland by Sam Quinones. It's well-researched and easy to read. It answers many of the questions asked here.
Because the corporations realize there is big money to be made selling narcotics.
These legal drugs kill more than cocaine, heroin and meth combined. Almost every week you hear about another celebrity dying from prescription drugs which is just one indication of how widespread the problem is.
Big pharma are the new dope pushers, and are even allowed to advertise their narcotics on television. Just form a corporation, come up with a fancy name for your drug, slap a nice-looking label on it and you too can sell dope legally.
My bet is that big pharma has a hand in it one way or another.
No doubt there's money to be had from addicting enough people on pain meds.
That's correct. Pill mills and shady doctors created addicts in rural areas like mine, and when the gov. restricted oxy prescriptions, supply dried up and heroin flooded in, when cartels saw the opportunity in east coast cities, and dealers started driving I-70 and I-81 and other main interstates in the mid-atlantic hitting the towns along the way.
These are not poor areas...Martinsburg, Hagerstown, Frederick, Winchester...all are growing cities, commutable to DC. Unemployment is low. Employers are crying for responsible workers. But too many are addicts. Because of the geographical misfortune of being located on the heroin highway from Baltimore.
But like another poster said, it is also boredom and low expectations that keep people in the cycle. Hopelessness is generational. Family members and friends get each other hooked and there is a whole culture that develops for the next generation to deal with.
Now everyone is ODing because the heroin is often mixed with Fentanyl from China, which can kill you instantly if a big enough granule enters your blood stream. Totally random. People are dying here like no one's ever seen.
This article in the New Yorker is about my town. I moved here 15 ears ago for a simpler life, commutable to the Washington DC area, and it was great for a long, long time. Everything started to change about 5 years ago. Of course I won't be staying much longer.
I have never taken a prescription drug in my life,not even an aspirin .My last physical was in 1969 when I got drafted.If I were to have a physical today I bet they would find all kinds of BS and I would walk out with multiple prescriptions with most to offset the side effects of the primary ones.I am a senior citizen being forced on medicare against my wishes and will stay drug free.America does not have healthcare but a bloated system of overpricing and legal drug pushers to get us addicted.It needs to be shut down yesterday!
As somebody who lives in rural America, there really isn't anything to do other than go to church or go to the bar. Obesity is a problem because people typically drive long distances, don't exercise on a daily basis, and tend to eat lower quality food. I think the boringness of rural America encourages things like alcoholism and drug addiction. As you said, rural America, especially landlocked states far from water or mountains, are experiencing the worst of it.
I was born and raised and lived in rural NV most of my life. I was very seldom just bored to tears, but I did live a ranch style life. Had stock to care for and my hobbies fit the environment. I had a four ten work schedule for a lot of the years and I didn't spend time in bars to fill in time outside of a few games of pool with my buddies here and there usually calling it at a couple beers and some laughs and this was not a regular thing.
I was more bored and spent more time in bars and clubs when I did live in the city through most of my 20s after HS. We ate good food, raising our own meat and had a garden, and also had access to good quality food from local growers/raisers as well when needed. Fresh eggs and poultry (I refused to keep chickens, cattle and pigs yea, but I wanted nothing to do with chickens) other vegetables that we didn't grow ourselves we would trade with friends for, and fish from the rivers, ponds and lakes figured in a lot as well. mmmmm, fresh caught trout. I did a lot of smoking and preserving/canning with meats, soups, stews and such. Our diet was awesome.
The town near where my little ranch was (unfortunately the ex buggered me in the divorce and forced me back into a more urban setting again as of now) has changed some in terms of the drug/alcohol issues. The problem children are pretty much located in certain areas and are well known by the community and local LE. The biggest issues with drugs are coming from the influx of Mexican labor for the big ranches, many of whom are not farm workers but are setting up shop for the cartels to manufacture and distribute meth to locations in CA urban centers. They cook and mule it out mostly. They don't deal heavy weight locally.
They have some pretty large operations set up on the reservation that the valley I lived in borders on. A LOT of meth gets cooked and shipped out of that rez. They are safe from LE because it's set up on tribal land that federal, state and local LE has no jurisdiction on. Not unless the tribal government invites them to act on, which doesn't happen much. Only to parties that don't pay the "tribal tax" on their product. Small time, unaffiliated freelancers. The major weight getting put out is all in the pockets of the cartels.
It's a huge and remote reservation, and is prime real estate for meth cookers. They also have some pretty innovative ways to ship it out. There are two towns bracketing the rez. My home town and another just SE. The town to the SE is more openly and brazenly run down and drugged up than my town. It's surrounded by a military base, and the town is pretty shabby and run down. The meth maggots and such are not confined to specific areas, but are mixed all through every area of the town. It's not unusual to see nice house, druggy house, just in that order all down most of the streets there.
There is no city police, it's not an incorporated township so the county sheriff is the main LE agency. And hey are as corrupt and on the take as any Mexican police agency could be. Boldly so, as a matter of fact. The base is the main employer, the towns major production assets are trash, tumbleweeds and generally flat weird people. I worked on the base myself for almost 20 years. Pay was good, I was a tradesman and had a good job, but only lived in the town for a short time. My home town was not a bad commute to get to work and was a far better place to raise my son. This town is a Hollywood stereotype of a NV small town. Boredom is a serious issue there and the drugs and alcohol are numero uno on the recreation/free time agenda.
Local LE, county government and highly placed executives on the base (its contractor run) are all getting cuts of the drug trade for one provided service or another and they are the people calling all the shots within the community. Nobody says anything about what goes on there. One person did blow the whistle to the state about the SOs corruption, and wound up on a slab I the MEs office. A "justified" LE shooting on a "domestic disturbance" call. Quite....convenient. Oh, there was an investigation, but nobody would talk. The whole town is in thrall. I literally HATE the place, and have zero respect for the people who live there in those conditions. Just working on the base was hard enough for me, but I didn't have to live there. I wound up losing my job there because I did kick up a fuss about certain "executive privileges" with women in the workforce. When this privilege was attempted with someone I cared and still care for very deeply I became more than angry. It cost me my job but I still see that as more of a blessing than a hardship and neither of us has looked back with any regrets for getting out of there.
This place is a prime example of a small town gone very, very wrong. I've never seen worse anywhere else in the state, or in the country for that matter. And the problem starts at the very top of the community. If you live there, you either play ball or pay the price. Keep your mouth shut. If a person in an"executive" position wants something from you, you quietly acquiesce. What they want, as in my case, may just be ....cooperation...from your significant other in filling certain desires. Failure to play ball can cost you anything from your job, and thus your home and everything else all the way to your very life if one jumps the wall of silence and goes off the reservation, so to speak.
Small towns have their issues. Of late Rx opiate meds have become a hot commodity in the town I speak of. They are rivaling meth as the drug of choice for local consumption, and now heroine is starting to cascade in as it's cheaper and easier to get than Rx opiates. With more intense effects. Twixt the meth, now augmented by Rx opiates and heroine rapidly replacing those, the hold the pillars of the community have over the population is nigh on unbreakable. Since they control most of the employment and the local drug trade, it's petty much a cartel branch of it's own.
I would think that there are a lot of rural areas under such control. If one were to really look deep, it's probably a serious problem nationwide. This place just happens to be particularly brazen about it. It would take an act of congress involving the military it seems to bring them down. At the very least a bunch of covert assassinations of a particularly brutal nature. Cutting the head off the snake as it were and leaving a power vaccum that others would be afraid to try and fill. The place can't keep doctors of any quality. I can't even count on my fingers and toes how many I saw come and go just in the space of a year. The ones that stay are in on the supply end of the pain med market. I've never seen a workforce so prone to "nonspecific spinal injuries". Ones that require long term high volume "pain management", like running scrips for 360 pills per month. The DEAs new regs on pain meds hasn't really effected supply, but it has jacked up street prices. Not just in this town, but everywhere. And booted the door open for the heroine option.
It's a situation that really brings up a serious desire to fight back, but the odds of putting up a successful fight are long indeed. For my lady and I, getting out of there, (both of us worked on the base) was the best option. The place has no power over us anymore and we can see them coming from a long way off now. We left most of our major problems behind us, from our exes to the influence of the ...ruling class by saddling up and sinking spur. And we haven't looked back with any lament.
It does seem like there's been a lot of rural bashing threads on here lately. I think it's great that our urban betters look down on us drooling, morbidly obese, walmart shipping, meth crazed rural simpletons. Maybe they'll all stay far away in the cities.
Why would it be a surprise to find that people in areas that voted predominately for Trump, also have other serious problems, as well?
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Ones that require long term high volume "pain management", like running scrips for 360 pills per month. The DEAs new regs on pain meds hasn't really effected supply, but it has jacked up street prices. Not just in this town, but everywhere. And booted the door open for the heroine option. 
