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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's actually not getting much attention.  It's absolutely DECIMATING the poor white demographics, to the point where that is the only group where the average age of death has DECREASED over the past decade.

It doesn't get attention because it's not fashionable or politically expedient to talk about poor white people. [/quote]

It's not getting attention because we've carefully cultivated a culture of individualism and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.  Makes it easy to say it's your problem, your fault, your responsibility to fix, at your expense.  Remember when we all watched on television while an entire city drowned or sat stranded on rooftops for days?  With all that tongue-clucking about why those people didn't leave when they were told.

Treatment for opioid addiction requires long-term medication and behavioral therapy.  The places hardest hit may have one center where they can get this within a few hundred miles, but may not have the money to pay for it or transportation to get there, repeatedly for months on end for the time it takes to reconfigure the brain.  They may not have a parent like the one up thread who fought and fought and fought for her daughter.  They're more likely surrounded by people with their own problems and a propensity to exacerbate abuse in all forms.  And it's REALLY expensive.  Outpatient therapy can run up to five figures or more and most insurance, even if you've got it, will cover only a fraction if any.  Residential, inpatient treatment hits five figures in less than a month and once the money dries up the patient is actually back to square one.

And it's not getting attention because it's getting too hard to say it's happening to someone else, so it's not our problem.  Even here in this thread, people are not really aware of how this impacts our entire health system, renders law enforcement ineffective, and drags our economy at a cost to all of us.

I think America is great but, in too many ways, it is greatly negligent to its people.

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