Do we actually know that? I haven’t seen cites, but I think this is the same thing MichaelEMouse was asking - I guess I’ve been assuming alcoholics and drug addicts die with much less interaction with the health system overall given those I’ve known in my life, but I haven’t seen population-level statistics on that and am willing to be corrected.
I mean, take overdosing, which I think is the primary fatality vector for heavy drug users - I would bet 80%+ are “overdosed and was dead on arrival” and then another 15% “overdosed and after a month or less of medical care, died,” with maybe 5% “overdosed and needed long term care and lots of medical intervention before finally dying.”
And that just HAS to be less overall medical cost in that cohort than the much broader old-aged “lurched along the last two decades of life with obesity, diabetes, a few heart attacks, and multiple comorbidities before dying” population.
Ah, I think we’re talking about two different things then. I fully stipulate smoking and drinking and drugging will age people faster and impair their health while alive, but I still think we save money overall on them.
Take smoking for example, which is probably better studied than illegal drug use; studies in 2008 and 2012 found that reducing smoking in the population actually increases total healthcare costs, because although smokers have higher annual average costs while alive, they die many years sooner and overall save money.
I would expect this medical expense savings effect to be even stronger in drug and alcohol dependent populations, as smoking takes 8 years off your life, but opiates take 18 and alcohol 26 years.
In a big city like Chicago or NYC, it costs up to one million dollars to prosecute a felony drug charge if it goes to trial, and about $35,000 a year to incarcerate the person after conviction. It’s not about more money, it’s about how we spend it.
While I can see legalizing marijuana and maybe coke I cannot see others like meth because some drugs are just so nasty and addicting that keeping them illegal just might be protecting people from themselves.
I thought it was the other way around - that smoking reduces health care costs, overall, because [ul][li]Smoking-related illness is a relatively cheap way to die. A common first symptom of heart disease, for instance, is death. [/li]
Cite. And for diseases like lung cancer, once you are symptomatic, you die quickly, and don’t incur the other health care costs of old age.
[li]Smokers tend to die before they collect Social Security, so that saves money too. If I die from smoking in my fifties, I have paid into SS but don’t collect from it. [/ul]That doesn’t mean that smoking is a good idea.[/li]
Regards,
Shodan
According to this chart, most of the OD deaths are not from heroin.
Heroin - 15,469.
Synthetic opioids - 19,413
Natural and semi-synthetic opioids like oxycodone and hydrocodone -14,487.
I think much of the synthetic opioid is Chinese Fentanyl. I don’t know how good quality control is in China, but I don’t think that’s the problem. Fentanyl is very, very potent, so even pharmaceutical-grade is going to be more liable to overdose.
No doubt a lot of it is due to pharmaceutical sources being diverted to the street, but that is not IMO quite the same thing.
Hopefully a knowledgeable source (“Dr. Qadgop. Paging Dr. Qadgop.”) will be along to correct me.
Quality control at the dealer level.(Hence the quote marks) Fentanyl is often used to increase the potency of heroin while reducing the cost. The difficulty is getting it evenly mixed which results in many of the ODs.
The CDC page I linked includes the spectrum. If you get blitzed and fall off the veranda, breaking your neck in the ravine below, or wrack your car up on a tree, or eat the barrel of a shotgun from amplified despondency, it may take but one episode of drinking too much to truncate your existence. And ISTR reading a thread in this very board about a guy who still drinks 2 or 3 bottles of wine a day at age 80, so YMMV. Booze in quantity tends to make one stupid, but some people manage their stupid better than others.
In that case the 20 year old age of the data could be important as there could be an increase (or decrease, to be fair), of safe drinking culture. 26 years seems a little high from sheer physiological harm from even a hardcore bottle-downer, although it does seem in the right order of magnitude.
My only question is how legalizing recreational drugs would affect regulating everything else. By what system do we still regulate food and drugs for safety while still allowing sale of things that aren’t really safe, for effectiveness, and for counterindications? Obviously, there will great harm reduction in regulating the recreational stuff just for dosage and purity, but those aren’t the only things we regulate for. Would there be a separate category with looser standards? How do we deal with things that have both medicinal and recreational use? How do we navigate issues of liability?
