Friday, February 23, 2018

Guns vs Drugs

A.S. (one of my SVP Cincinnati Partners) sent me a link to Great Courses lecture on the Opioid Epidemic with University of Michigan Professor Thad Polk.

What is the single most common cause of death for people under age 50 in the USA?  Not car accidents; not aids, not gun related deaths.

Here's the answer:

Source:  Great Courses - Thad Polk Ph.D.


The media attention and national dialogue about the tragic loss of 17 people in a gun related death crisis in a Florida school is a natural reaction to shock and compressed timing/location (at School)  of those who died. Yet the slow -  one by one - deaths by overdose are hidden from our view and slip into obscurity.  This problem is overwhelmingly more important than gun control.  

Yes we lost 17 in less than an hour because of a mentally unstable person with access to a gun.  But what about the loss of 175 people EVERY DAY (7 per hour) by their own addictive condition using the equivalent of a gun inside their brain (that death instrument hidden quite effectively inside schools, medicine cabinets, and economically available for delivery to your door).

Where is our media outrage and national dialogue for the Opioid Epidemic?


PS -  Guns and Drugs by the numbers:

(1)  There are over 310 million guns owned by 37% of USA households.  Pew Research 2/2013
(2) Healthcare providers wrote over 259 million prescriptions for painkillers in 2012 and there are 2.1 million people suffering from Opioid substance abuse and 467,000 addicted to heroin.  CDC and Drugabuse.gov




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