World News

22059 readers

70 users here now

Breaking news from around the world.

News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.

Guidelines for submissions:

Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
Social media should be a source of last resort.

These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.

For US News, see the US News community.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

How Portugal eased its opioid epidemic, while U.S. drug deaths skyrocketed (www.npr.org)

submitted 8 months ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/news@beehaw.org

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml 15 points 8 months ago

Yeah, this was an easy one to call. It’s repeated in other countries as well.

One other factor that they don’t mention is that the surge in street opioids corresponded to a crackdown on doctors writing opioid prescriptions. I saw this coming when I was doing policy analysis and looking at unintended consequences in complex systems. I don’t remember much about what degree of a surge we saw in prescriptions, but I do remember all of those “pill mill” headlines. That always struck me as a pretty manufactured crisis - but even if not, the crackdown certainly didn’t improve the situation.