Rising Gender Equality

We are watching the largest fabrication of “alternative facts” in U.S. history to justify a shutdown of roughly a quarter of the federal government. All to get a long-tall wall that is hardly the best solution to drug trafficking, infiltration by terrorists or even to stem the tide of asylum seekers. Prayer rugs found at the border, suggesting Muslims (aka “terrorists” by reason of faith), although none was produced. Not much in the way of proof that “terrorists” are willing to take a life-risking march across a forbidding desert to enter the United States. Airports or Canada (build a great “white wall” there too?) are a whole lot easier. Tales of massive influx of fentanyl, cocaine and even marijuana (legal in so many states anyway) pouring across our un-walled border defy statistics – too easy to use normal ports of entry where you can bring in tons if you know what you are doing. Hey, at least the “wall” would give cartels an excuse to raise prices for their lethal wares.

Make no mistake. Drug addiction is a massive problem in this country. Well beyond the “kids getting high” mantra of yesteryear. More than simply folks on over-prescribed painkillers getting permanently hooked. It is the plague of the hopeless, people displaced from work and the American Dream, the result of accelerating polarization where the rich get tax cuts and the poor find that government healthcare coverage for drug addiction is being cut back to pay for those tax cuts. Prisons are too often the “treatment” centers for addicts and those with severe mental illness. How do you think that’s working out?! What does building a wall have to do with fixing any of this? Does a wall even address the oft-cited “humanitarian” crisis at the border?

What would happen if we redeployed the wasteful taxpayer-driven “Mexico will pay for it” wall into addiction treatment, transitional job training and tightening up the security around ports-of-entry where the drugs really pass through? If we don’t stem the demand for drugs here, what makes anyone think drug addiction will die even if a wall could make narcotics are harder to get? Doesn’t making illicit drugs more expensive simply increase the crime rate for folks who have no other way to feed their habits? We’re kidding ourselves if we think otherwise.

Trump’s base has a large constituency of people who have been promised their obsolete jobs back at wages that will never ever be paid for such work. Despite the decimation of environmental regulations under Team Trump, there have been more coal mine closures since The Donald has been in office than there were during a comparable period of the Obama administration. Well-paying jobs in blue-collar manufacturing and carbon fuel source extraction are vaporizing. General Motors and Ford… even Tesla… have cut back severely as car sales no longer justify the massive labor force once required. New jobs? Sure. In big cities. In the gig economy. In finance. Software. Logistics. Engineering. Low-paying service sector employment. And jobs nobody wants in slaughter houses, stoop labor agriculture, manning printing presses, hard labor construction (like hand digging in inaccessible areas), dishwashing, etc. left begging.

If you overlay maps of Rust Belt and Coal Belt unemployment with higher-than-national-average concentrations of addicts, there is remarkably congruity. The kinds of drugs in various regions underscores the seriousness of the issue. Look at the use of heroin (today often laced with or substituted by fentanyl) and opiates in the above map. Opiates and Trump-land go hand-in-hand. 

Too many folks have been out of work for so long, they are not even counted in the unemployment statistics; they have gotten used to a world of occasional odd-job work, food stamps, welfare and until such benefits run out, unemployment insurance. They want their old jobs back, even if they are no longer qualified to do the work even if such obsolete jobs were able to be returned. Because their fearful leader, Donald Trump, has promised them that result, so many see no reason to retrain and face a rather dramatic and irreversible change in what employers are willing to pay for. These folks are threatening to form a permanent and very angry underclass. But they have been marginalized and displaced any way you look at it.

The hard numbers say it all, and what is particularly disturbing is a gender equality increase that nobody wants: the rapid rise of female addicts. The January 19^th Los Angeles Times looks at the hard numbers, with support from government statistics and a recent study: “For many decades, drugs of abuse were a menace that mostly threatened the lives of men. In 1999, fewer than 1 in 25,000 adult women in the United States died of a drug overdose, and childbirth was twice as deadly… No more. Drug overdoses have become a prodigious thief of female lives in the U.S. And they are increasingly claiming women’s lives deep into middle age, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

“Of the 70,237 fatal drug overdoses in the United States during 2017, 18,110 of the victims were women between the ages of 30 and 64, records from the National Vital Statistics System show. That’s up from 4,314 in 1999… Some of the steepest increases in fatality rates have been seen in women who may not fit the public’s expectations of drug abusers. For instance, the rate of drug overdose deaths among women ages 55 to 64 multiplied by a factor of five between 1999 and 2017, driven by a tenfold increase in the rate of prescription opioid deaths.

“The finding that women well beyond middle age are misusing prescription drugs, abusing illicit drugs and probably taking dangerous drug combinations is more than just a curiosity. Added to an 80% rise in suicide rates among 45-to-64-year-old women since around the turn of the century, it suggests that daughters, wives, mothers and grandmothers are bearing greater strains than they have in the past.

“Along with rising death rates of alcohol-related diseases among women, fatal overdoses are sometimes referred to as ‘deaths of despair.’ In the last three years, they have begun to reverse decades of gains made in the nation’s life expectancy.

“The study in the Jan. 11 edition of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report also suggests that U.S. women are responding to stress in ways that are closing the long-standing gaps between men and women when it comes to self-harm, substance abuse and risk-taking behavior… For instance, the team from the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control found that, just as for men, the rate of fatal overdoses involving synthetic opioids spiked sharply in 2015. Women’s deaths attributed to these drugs — including fentanyl and tramadol — grew 16-fold in the 18 years leading up to 2017.

“Deaths linked to heroin and benzodiazepines, a class of prescription anti-anxiety drugs, also rose sharply, increasing 915% and 830%, respectively, between 1999 and 2017. Fatal overdoses of cocaine and antidepressants also grew, albeit more slowly… In 1999, the U.S. women at greatest risk of a fatal drug overdose were between the ages of 40 and 44. But back then, the risk of dying from an overdose dropped off sharply after a woman’s 50th birthday.

 

“Over the next 18 years, the rate of fatal overdoses rose for American women in all the age brackets between 30 and 64. But by 2017, they were highest among women in their early- to mid-50s. As a result, the average age of death due to a drug overdose rose from 43.5 to 46.5… Overdoses among American women ‘continue to be unacceptably high,’ the authors of the new report wrote.

“The study also makes clear that as medical and public health professionals struggle to stem a national epidemic of drug overdoses, they must pay particular attention to women — and to a wider range of women than they have in the past.” What are they so depressed or stressed about? We all know. What exactly do we think Donald Trump’s policies mean to all of these addicted souls? Reality vs what they believe? To Trump, a man with a profound and dramatically clear lack of empathy, it’s all about politics. Catering to his base, people led down the garden path of false hope, hanging on every fake slogan as if it were the gospel, and willing to follow the worst policy-making president in over a century.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and the mere fact that so many Trump-supporters actually believe that the “wall” will improve “all of the above” is so deeply disheartening.