In just one year, more than 100,000 people died from overdoses in the USA. A record. That’s four times more than gun deaths. And more than half of these deaths are due to excessive consumption of overpowering painkillers. Opium derivatives are sold aggressively by the pharmaceutical industry despite the addiction they cause.
A television series arrives in France, which precisely tells the cynicism of the pharmaceutical laboratory manufacturing and distributing these products, which have provokedone of the biggest health disasters current. It is a massacre, which continues to progress in the United States and begins to appear in a timid way in certain countries of Europe.
If the drug is not new, it is this particular drug that is new. A quasi-legal drug, which was marketed by pharmaceutical groups, under the name Oxycontine or Fentanyl. A Nobel laureate in economics, Angus Deaton, took an interest in the phenomenon in a book he published with his wife eighteen months ago.
They both investigated an unheard-of demographic fact: the rising death rate of white Americans between the ages of 45 and 55. Throughout the twentieth century, thelife expectancy had only increased, for this generation as for the others.
And now, for the first time outside of periods of war or epidemic, it has fallen for those called “red necks”. The little white Americans, because of what Deaton calls the “dead of despair”: suicide, alcoholism and overdose.
What makes this population so desperate?
It is the disappearance of industrial jobs but also the stagnation, even the fall in income from unskilled jobs that also makes them desperate. Angus Deaton and Anne Case then make two astonishing observations.
On the one hand, this epidemic only affects those who have a diploma below bac minus 4, that is to say to a master’s degree. Graduates are therefore spared, because their professional opportunities are good.
Secondly, opioid overdose deaths are concentrated in states such as Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, where the education level is the lowest the United States. Conversely, in California, New Jersey or Illinois, where the standard of living and education is high, there is no excess mortality among whites in this age group. Clearly, it is an epidemic with social roots.
A problem that is concentrated in white populations
This problem tends to be concentrated among whites for different reasons depending on the authors. First, the social situation of white people deteriorates, while that of black, even if it is not better in absolute value, improves, because they started from much lower. Then, the whites were used to thinking that even poor, they were still better off than the blacks. This is no longer true. Hence a feeling of downgrading unprecedented. And therefore despair.
The Sackler family, owners of the labs that made Oxycontin, were forced to bankrupt the company under the weight of billions of dollars in damages to be paid as a result of the lawsuits. But already from new producers arrive, with the mexican drug cartels, who manufacture pills with raw materials from China and sell them on the streets through their distribution networks.
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