undefined | Better HN

0 pointsheavyset_go5y ago0 comments

> I'll express another one: I think the whole thing about "ZOMG! Suicide rates through the roof!!!elevelty!1!" is blown out of proportion, largely thanks to pseudo-news web sites trying to grab clicks on the internet.

Certain news sites in my state spent 2020 lamenting about how the lockdown is causing overdose deaths to skyrocket. Well, 2021 rolls around and the 2020 overdose death statistics were calculated, and there were about a dozen more overdose deaths in 2020 than in 2019, a change that is statistically insignificant when comparing it to the tens of thousands of overdoses that occurred in the state each year in 2019 and 2020, or to the tens of thousands of people who died from COVID there in 2020.

For whatever reason, the types of people who shared such news in 2020 were not the kind of people who gave two shits about addiction and its effects on others before the pandemic. I say this as a person who has struggled with addiction in the past and has lost numerous people I care about to it. It seems to me that the overdose stats were merely a tool to be used to complain about policy that they disliked.

0 comments

the_only_law5y ago

> For whatever reason, the types of people who shared such news in 2020 were not the kind of people who gave two shits about addiction and its effects on others before the pandemic.

You’ll find this is common with a lot of political subjects, I could name a few that come up HN seemingly weekly now. Pick up a cause when it's politically convenient, drop it afterwards. I don’t trust anyone or their intentions when it comes to these sort of things.

harambae5y ago

>2021 rolls around and the 2020 overdose death statistics were calculated, and there were about a dozen more overdose deaths in 2020 than in 2019

Do you have a citation for this? All statistics I have seen are the exact opposite, showing wildly worse OD stats for 2020 than 2019 [0]

Now some synthetic opioid OD stats could be affected by availability and popularity having little to do with COVID, so lets look at a more historically available drug...

"Overdose deaths involving cocaine also increased by 26.5 percent" [0].

How do you explain that one? And it's not that clubs and raves are finding some new popularity, they've been shut down absent a recent and limited subset of Florida towns.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p1218-overdose-death...

heavyset_goOP5y ago

Check your citation, it refers to overdose deaths nationwide between the period of June 2019 until May 2020. The vast majority of those deaths occurred before there were lock downs in the end of March and beginning of April 2020.

Your stats include about a month or two of lock downs at most.

My stats refer to the period between January 2020 and the end of December 2020 in a single state. I'm not about to dox myself, but we can use another state's data to illustrate the same point. In NJ, there were 3,021 overdose deaths in 2019, and in 2020, there were 3,046 overdoses, an increase of only 25 deaths[1], or 0.83%.

> "Overdose deaths involving cocaine also increased by 26.5 percent" [0]. How do you explain that one?

Cocaine and psychostimulants are becoming increasingly popular year-over-year. For example, the CDC reports that psychostimulant overdose deaths increased by 37% in 2017[2], and drug overdose deaths involving cocaine increased by more than 34%.

The CDC reports that from 2009 to 2018, cocaine overdose deaths nearly tripled[3], and between 2014 and 2018, the rate of drug overdose deaths involving cocaine with opioids increased at a faster pace than the rate of cocaine deaths without opioids. If you look at the compiled data[3], between 2015 and 2018, cocaine overdose deaths skyrocketed.

Part of the trend might be related to increasingly adulterated cocaine[4] with fentanyl and designer stimulants over the past few years.

[1] https://whyy.org/articles/n-j-saw-a-slight-uptick-in-drug-ov...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/otherdrugs.html

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db384.htm

[4] https://khn.org/news/not-yesterdays-cocaine-death-toll-risin...

monocasa5y ago

> And it's not that clubs and raves are finding some new popularity

There's been a resurgence in underground raves.

p1necone5y ago

Frothing covid deniers/lockdown protestors will cling on to anything that lets them win arguments with people on the internet. Assuming these people and the news outlets they frequent are communicating in good faith is a fools errand.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse