Opioid Abuse, Alcoholism And Suicide Plagues Youth As America Becomes De-facto Third World

We first wrote about what came to be called about deaths of despair when the landmark work by Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel prize winner in economics, and his wife Anne Case, on the dramatic rise in the death rate of middle-aged, less educated whites. Even though this study and a follow-on did garner a great deal of major media attention, there was almost nothing in the way of action to try to alleviate this crisis.

The cancer of inaction seems to be working its way through its host, as in the US. The Wall Street Journal reports "Young Americans Are Dying at Alarming Rates, Reversing Years of Progress". You’ll see many of the causes parallel those of lamented but not acted upon deaths of despair.

The big culprits are linked to despair, namely “poisoning” which is opioid abuse first and alcoholism second, and suicides. Case and Deaton dug into the underlying statistics, and found distressingly high levels of pain and impaired health in this age group, so pain and physical impairment may well be bigger culprits than economic distress.

And unlike chaotic post-Soviet Russia, the US does not have a good excuse as to why this has been happening in a period of supposed growth, and even worse, with no one noticing until now. Yes, there have been warning signs of distress, such as the fact that US life expectancy has stopped rising, that death rates among white women had risen (and over the same time period examined in the Case-Deaton study), and that the US is alone among developed countries in having an increasing maternal mortality rate. And even though the chattering classes may not have been aware of the rise in the death rate of whites, it had been troubling researchers for some time.

Just take a stroll down any metropolitan street in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, or New York City, and you will feel like you just stepped onto the movie set of “World War Z.” There are actual zombies roaming the streets, sleeping standing up, and moaning from the flesh-eating disorder they have from taking a pet tranquilizer that eats human flesh (they thought they were just smoking fentanyl and crack). The zombie drug “tranq dope,” also known by veterinarians as xylazine, is now frequently used by drug dealers to “cut” other drugs (spread them out so they make more money), while further complicating the drug addiction nightmare for users.

Just as one may have thought the illicit drug supply couldn’t get any more dangerous and deadly, it did. Many drug dealers use baby laxatives to cut cocaine and crack so they can make it look like there’s more to buy and use, and double or triple their profits. The side effects for drug users boiled down to a bad case of the runs, and then whatever else happens to the heart, brain, and cleansing organs from the continued drug use.

Now there is xylazine, a drug used by veterinarians and fellow surgeons for anesthesia, sedation, muscle relaxation, and analgesia. Doesn’t sound so bad for drug addicts, but the drug wasn’t made for humans, but mainly cattle, horses, and other mammals. Turns out, it’s too dangerous to use on humans because it causes dangerously low blood pressure, critically low heart rates, and wait for it… a disorder that eats away at the flesh.

The DEA is warning of a “widespread threat” of fentanyl cut with xylazine, the “zombie drug” that is stolen from veterinary clinics and mixed with other street drugs. Xylazine is ultra-deadly and can eat away at human flesh when consumed or smoked. Also, the fentanyl anecdote NARCAN does not work to save people from xylazine overdose.