(Nov 10, 2020 05:54 AM)Leigha Wrote: [ -> ]In their new book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Case and Deaton try to answer a simple but profound question: Why? Why are non-college-educated whites dying of drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning, and suicide at unprecedented rates? And what does this have to do with the peculiar strain of modern American capitalism?
It's not surprising that social-science academics (especially those appearing in "The Daily Princetonian") would want to shift the opioid-epidemic narrative to "American capitalism" being a primary cause or THE blame recipient. They enter such research beforehand with their own motivated reasoning (its goals and hermeneutical filters). Thus, those preconceptions fit data to the background theories and conspiracy frameworks of their own political culture.
Opioid Addiction Drug Going Mostly To Whites, Even As Black Death Rate Rises
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shot...ose-in-bla
EXCERPT:
"This epidemic over the last few years has been framed by many as largely a white epidemic, but we know now that's not true," Lagisetty says. [...] The fact that just 25% of the visits were paid for through Medicaid and Medicare "does highlight that many of these visits could be very costly for persons of low income," Lagisetty says.
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The Vox article seems to highlight that non-college Whites qualify in that low income category, too, despite this article focusing on non-Whites getting the short end of that stick with regard to the treatment drug. Can't afford the treatment, more likely to die from fentanyl abuse. It's roughly akin to the
missing white woman syndrome. If "lots" of whites are supposedly dying, it attracts more media attention to the crusader cause of trying to change this or that system to a collectivist one. So that becomes a veiled agenda for the two economics scholars.
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How China flooded the U.S. with lethal fentanyl, fueling the opioid crisis (i.e., the role of socialist Chinese "capitalism")
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-ro...38423.html
EXCERPT: I [
Ben Westhoff] went really deep and tried to learn everything I could about this problem, and that brought me to China,” he said. “I actually went undercover into a pair of Chinese drug operations, including, I went into a fentanyl lab outside Shanghai. And I was pretending to be a drug dealer.”
He continued: “What I learned was that these companies making fentanyl and other dangerous drugs are subsidized by the government. And so when they work in these suburban office parks, for example, the building, the costs for research and development, they have these development zones, they get export tax breaks.”
Shoddy regulations on China’s side has led to these drugs entering the U.S. The U.S.-China Business Council stated this is in large part because local governments were prioritizing economic growth and development objectives “above all else,” in addition to “the fragmented nature of China’s administrative system that oversees the production and export of chemical and pharmaceutical products.”
Lax postal service regulations have also contributed to the drug’s rise in the U.S. Initially, those who were shipping fentanyl from China to the U.S. would mislabel the packages and ship them through another country as an extra precaution.