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pbmus's JournalHow Opioids Started Killing Americans
It’s been conventional wisdom for some time now that America’s opioid epidemic began at the pharmacy. Now there are numbers that put any doubt to rest.
More than half of all people who succumbed to an overdose between 2001 to 2007 were chronic pain sufferers who filled an opioid prescription and sometimes even saw a doctor in the month before they died. Only 4 percent were ever diagnosed as having an abuse problem, said Dr. Mark Olfson, one of five researchers who conducted a massive study of the crisis and its causes for Columbia University Medical Center.
The findings of the new study, published Tuesday in the American Journal of Psychiatry, split the epidemic into two groups: those who were diagnosed with chronic pain and those who weren’t. In the year before they died, about two-thirds of those studied were diagnosed with chronic pain and prescribed an opioid. (Many would also get a prescription for anti-anxiety drugs called benzodiazepines, which can make for a deadly combination.) The other third among those who died had no diagnosed chronic pain but became addicted to opioids in another way.
“Those are different populations,” Olfson said in a telephone interview. “Understanding those things puts us in a better position to combat the epidemic.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-28/how-opioids-started-killing-americans?utm_campaign=news&utm_medium=bd&utm_source=applenews
How far will Hannity Go?
How Far Will Sean Hannity Go?
The Fox News host is willing to defend Trump at all costs — and is reaching more than 13 million people a day.
By MATTHEW SHAERNOV. 28, 2017
When he finally went to bed early in the morning on Oct. 2, Sean Hannity had a good sense, as he typically does, of how he would structure that night’s Fox News Channel broadcast. He’d lead with Puerto Rico, and a defense of the Trump administration’s hurricane relief efforts, before moving on to the N.F.L. players who continued to kneel during the national anthem before games. But by the time he woke up, a few hours later — Hannity rarely sleeps more than four hours a night, a trait he shares with his friend President Trump — the screen of his iPhone was jammed with alerts of a shooting in downtown Las Vegas, where a man named Stephen Paddock had opened fire on the attendees of a country-music festival. Dozens were dead, hundreds injured. “What the hell is going on?” Hannity recalls thinking
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/magazine/how-far-will-sean-hannity-go.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
Here Are the Districts That Will Be Brutal Battlegrounds in 2018
Welcome back to House Party, our column looking at the 2018 House of Representative races as midterms approach.
Since the 2016 election, there’s been a lot of talk of “Obama–Trump voters,” people who cast ballots for Barack Obama twice before supporting Donald Trump. The assumption among many pundits is that Democrats will have to win back those voters if they want to overthrow Republican control of the federal government. But there are other tranches of voters Democrats should be thinking about as well. Today we’re going to take a tour of US House districts that voted for Obama in 2008 but switched to Mitt Romney in 2012 before switching again and voting for Hillary Clinton last year.
If 2018 turns out to be a wave election, Democrats should win most of these seats. But Obama-Romney-Clinton voters might be willing to back Republicans who are more like Romney than Trump, and they’re certainly going to be competitive. Let's take a look:
California’s 49th Congressional District (Southern Orange County/North San Diego County)
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbyej/here-are-the-districts-that-will-be-brutal-battlegrounds-in-2018
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