Some people aren’t polite about their drug addictions, and some of us are rude in return. They’re called names, like “crackheads.” How messy that such substances are purchased on streets. When these folks are minorities, the meanest among us assign blame to them based on race. It’s appalling and counterproductive. 

I’ve thought for the past decade that white Americans of what used to be called the middle class have a very polite and well-mannered drug epidemic in oxycodone and the like. The whole undertaking is as neat and clean as a prescription pad. Reports of a spiked usage would regularly be published, but I worried that maybe I suffered from confirmation bias because I’ve spent so much time visiting relatives in hospitals the last few years. In these facilities, it’s easy to assume an oxy epidemic. The same goes for other self-destructive behaviors (obesity, alcoholism, etc.) appearing to be rampant.

It’s worth wondering how much opioid use is causing the alarming trend in the U.S. of the increasing deaths in white, middle-aged citizens, which has just been reported in a stunning paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. Why are people in this group drugging, eating and drinking themselves to death? Why have they become the walking dead? Some of it is overt suicide, some buried in risky behaviors.

From Gina Kolata of the New York Times:

The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.

“It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” wrote two Dartmouth economists, Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner, in a commentary to the Deaton-Case analysis to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Wow,” said Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of populations, who was not involved in the research. “This is a vivid indication that something is awry in these American households.”

Dr. [Angus] Deaton had but one parallel. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” he said. …

David M. Cutler, a Harvard health care economist, said that although it was known that people were dying from causes like opioid addiction, the thought was that those deaths were just blips in the health care statistics and that over all everyone’s health was improving. The new paper, he said, “shows those blips are more like incoming missiles.”•