Listen, if this is going to be The Five Whys, save it for a preachier audience, prone to emotion.
Opiate use is not a concept that fits inside 140 characters. The most stunning reality, regarding the opioid epidemic is that it came hot on the heels of the incredible ravages of the methamphetamine/crystal meth wave that shredded many parts of the U.S. only a few short years ago.
People use the drugs because they catch a taste, and are shocked by the realization that they like it. It's suddenly not the spectre of evil, when a familiar acquaintance turns you onto something in a relaxed atmosphere. And it keeps happening, and it spreads, and spreads, and spreads.
Because there's an unrestricted supply. Legal or not. People make it happen. The people who acquire that taste pull hard, and the people who make money push it on them even harder.
The power structure that sits atop it all is a mountain range, with many peaks. Some peaks are beyond U.S. borders, in Mexico, China, Afghanistan. Some of it started with the global war on terror and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, but we're way beyond that now, and the epidemic is a raging forrest fire, when considering the lit cigarette of Islamic terror flicked into the dry field of Afghan tinder
back in 2002.
New pills. New companies. A dehumanizing internet. Asocial people staring at smart phones, playing video games, avoiding human interaction in real life. Joblessness amid celebrity. Broken social norms. Ruined financial stature. Warped perception of peers and status. Both hopelessness and hopeful promise in equal measure, and drugs to help to forget the bad time and feel good, through it all, even if artificially.
One could write volumes. One could craft the career of a historian, regaling heraldry of a decade's new nightmare wasteland as people check out from a lifetime of broken promises by disintegrated peers, anesthetized by milk of the poppy.
Listen, if this is going to be The Five Whys, save it for a preachier audience, prone to emotion.
Opiate use is not a concept that fits inside 140 characters. The most stunning reality, regarding the opioid epidemic is that it came hot on the heels of the incredible ravages of the methamphetamine/crystal meth wave that shredded many parts of the U.S. only a few short years ago.
People use the drugs because they catch a taste, and are shocked by the realization that they like it. It's suddenly not the spectre of evil, when a familiar acquaintance turns you onto something in a relaxed atmosphere. And it keeps happening, and it spreads, and spreads, and spreads.
Because there's an unrestricted supply. Legal or not. People make it happen. The people who acquire that taste pull hard, and the people who make money push it on them even harder.
The power structure that sits atop it all is a mountain range, with many peaks. Some peaks are beyond U.S. borders, in Mexico, China, Afghanistan. Some of it started with the global war on terror and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, but we're way beyond that now, and the epidemic is a raging forrest fire, when considering the lit cigarette of Islamic terror flicked into the dry field of Afghan tinder back in 2002.
New pills. New companies. A dehumanizing internet. Asocial people staring at smart phones, playing video games, avoiding human interaction in real life. Joblessness amid celebrity. Broken social norms. Ruined financial stature. Warped perception of peers and status. Both hopelessness and hopeful promise in equal measure, and drugs to help to forget the bad time and feel good, through it all, even if artificially.
One could write volumes. One could craft the career of a historian, regaling heraldry of a decade's new nightmare wasteland as people check out from a lifetime of broken promises by disintegrated peers, anesthetized by milk of the poppy.