More on the White Death:
Drug Overdoses Propel Rise in Mortality Rates of Young Whites
NYT
By GINA KOLATA and SARAH COHEN JAN. 16, 2016 538 COMMENTS
Drug overdoses are driving up the death rate of young white adults in the United States to levels not seen since the end of the AIDS epidemic more than two decades ago — a turn of fortune that stands in sharp contrast to falling death rates for young blacks, a New York Times analysis of death certificates has found.
The rising death rates for those young white adults, ages 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years of the mid-1960s to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it.
The Times analyzed nearly 60 million death certificates collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1990 to 2014. It found death rates for non-Hispanic whites either rising or flattening for all the adult age groups under 65 — a trend that was particularly pronounced in women — even as medical advances sharply reduce deaths from traditional killers like heart disease. Death rates for blacks and most Hispanic groups continued to fall.
The analysis shows that the rise in white mortality extends well beyond the 45- to 54-year-old age group documented by a pair of Princeton economists in a research paper that startled policy makers and politicians two months ago.
While the death rate among young whites rose for every age group over the five years before 2014, it rose faster by any measure for the less educated, by 23 percent for those without a high school education, compared with only 4 percent for those with a college degree or more.
The drug overdose numbers were stark. In 2014, the overdose death rate for whites ages 25 to 34 was five times its level in 1999, and the rate for 35- to 44-year-old whites tripled during that period. The numbers cover both illegal and prescription drugs. …
There is a reason that blacks appear to have been spared the worst of the narcotic epidemic, said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a drug abuse expert. Studies have found that doctors are much more reluctant to prescribe painkillers to minority patients, worrying that they might sell them or become addicted.
“The answer is that racial stereotypes are protecting these patients from the addiction epidemic,” said Dr. Kolodny, a senior scientist at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University and chief medical officer for Phoenix House Foundation, a national drug and alcohol treatment company. …
Researchers are struggling to come up with an answer to the question of why whites in particular are doing so poorly. No one has a clear answer, but researchers repeatedly speculate that the nation is seeing a cohort of whites who are isolated and left out of the economy and society and who have gotten ready access to cheap heroin and to prescription narcotic drugs.
“There are large numbers of people who never get established in the economy, who live outside family relationships and are on the edge of poverty,” Dr. Hayward said. Many end up taking prescription narcotics, he added.
“Poverty and stress, for example, are risk factors for misuse of prescription narcotics,” Dr. Hayward said.
Eileen Crimmins, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California, said the causes of death in these younger people were largely social — “violence and drinking and taking drugs.” Her research shows that social problems are concentrated in the lower education group.
“For too many, and especially for too many women,” she said, “they are not in stable relationships, they don’t have jobs, they have children they can’t feed and clothe, and they have no support network.”
Comments:
* Just what I needed on a Monday morning! Spiritual death leading to physical death. Without some kind of “white pride,” or “white identitarian” movement (preferably religious in nature), coupled with trade and immigration policies that emphasize creating good-paying domestic job (mostly in manufacturing) the United States can just kiss large portions of its previously-core population good-bye.
I remember Robert Neville’s lines in The Omega Man: “Build coffins; it’s all you’ll need.”
* Geez. Doctors are racist. Ironic he could see that with it his institution being named after Helen Keller.
* Being hated by your own people, by your own society seems to increase morbidity and mortality. Merely to be hated by your own kind reduces life expectancy.
* Is this at all similar to what we saw in Russia in the 90s, when lifespans collapsed, especially for men?
Religion is dead, and what it traditionally meant to be an American is dead. The people who finished school only a few years after me seem to have graduated with a completely different (and entirely vacuous) notion of what it means to be American. They’re paying for it. We’re all paying for it.
* Thanks liberals. All those social structures that you work to tear down are the framework which provided structure and meaning to the lives of many people. This idea of people who are atomized in society and stripped of all social support except for Mother Government isn’t working. Churches, family, stable jobs, social pressure to get married, social pressure to have kids within marriage, social pressure to stay in your marriage, these all build a web of meaning and support around people.
* When I was diagnosed with cancer at the end of 1996, I looked into the subject of painkillers. There seemed to be a general elite consensus at the time that painkiller access should be liberalized in America. My impression is that it was, although I don’t know exactly when or how.
You started seeing an upsurge in non-counterculture celebrities — Rush Limbaugh, Chandler on “Friends,” etc. — with pain pill problems in the early 2000s.
I can recall reviewing a movie around 2002 starring Chandler in which it was pretty clear that the director was having him physically treated with kid gloves in the action scenes so he wouldn’t hurt his back and wind up on pills again. About a decade later he was in a sitcom as a radio host trying to put his life back together after rehab. It wasn’t bad, although they downplayed the Limbaugh links, which made it a little more generic.
Subsequently, they (and I’m not exactly sure who they are or when they did it) apparently tightened up on the pain pills and that made cheap Mexican heroin more popular as a substitute.
* Upon reading the post more closely, it appears that the death rate is up among women as well as men; unlike the older age cohorts, where the increased death rates are among men but not women. This is even more troubling; young men have always been more “disposable,” in the sense that they are natural risk-takers. But when young women start dying at higher rates, your people are in for a rough ride.
Since this phenomenon appears confined to the United States, I suspect that much of it is an artifact of greater availability of both prescription and illegal drugs. I don’t think that greater availability of legal cannabis is going to make the situation one wit better.
* Moral torpor and political infantilization are ugly phrases. Still, I think they describe a large population in today’s America who’ve still got good jobs, enough discretionary income for consumer goodies, homes in the self-segregated ‘burbs, a tunnel vision about their situation that’s beyond belief. They have no desire (and no economic incentive) to look at the world around them in critical terms, and they’ll play ball with the political Zeitgeist, because the costs of dissent are too high and the rewards too vague and distant.
Back in the 1980s, I had a lengthy conversation with a former executive of a bankrupt area steel mill that had once employed about 50,000 in several states, and maybe 20,000 locally. He really didn’t know of the decision to liquidate until a few days before the decision was announced. He was a tough-guy industrialist with a technical background, so he must have had an inkling that our local mills were obsolete on price, but, a steady paycheck, the business-as-usual routine at work, a disinclination to tell his bosses bad news, etc. had him blind-sided.
My point, I guess, is the obvious. More people will have to hurt before a “constituency of the dispossessed” will sway political decisions. I don’t like thinking like that, but our political caste likes to portray big decisions as having been forced on them.
* It may be that white elites will have to start feeling the effects of the dispossession before there can be a change. I think Steve Sailer said that the British might have kept their American colonies if only they had given George Washington the British regular army commission that he craved. If elites start seeing themselves dispossessed by blacks, Hispanics, East and South Asians, etc., than they might develop an identitarian perspective–they may never do it on behalf of the white “underclass.” I suppose a large cohort of well-educated white men and women between their mid-30′s and early 50′s who find themselves unemployed or working survival jobs (“Do you want fries with that?”) while watching minorities doing well might become a force for revolution. But not until.
* I am now wiser for being a better Catholic, but I once was young and dumb and frequently intoxicated. We stole so much Robitussin that they moved it behind the counter. Primmer people have no idea how fucked up Dextromethorphan can get you, when instead of taking two you take thirty. The brothers call it sippin on sizzurp.
Prescription painkillers presumably are the bane of lost souls and main factor in addictions that lead to death, but I will say this: by my sight the loose ends in the system are doctors flat corrupt, because you can’t go shopping from one to the next the way the way pharmacies are electronically universalized, so that every single one knows when you last got prescribed anything, and thus when you’re refills legit. A bunch of folks are getting drugs who need them so they can sell them, it would seem.
I don’t say this lightly, because it’s terribly sad and I regret knowing it, but a whole bunch of the heroin enters this country on Navy boats. That, such that if you were going to make a guess about heroin overdoses after a decade of our boys in Afghanistan, well more than less would’ve been the obvious guess. I myself knew one who went that way. RIP.
* You destroy their faith by telling them there is nothing but stuff.
You destroy their morality by telling them they are sexual animals with a right to satisfy their lusts.
You shame them by foisting filth and violent entertainment on them to pervert their children.
You destroy their independence by taking their money and throwing a few coins back in welfare
You destroy their families by allowing marriage as an institution to be destroyed.
You allow some families to earn double incomes while others see their jobs destroyed and shipped overseas.
You allow the easy passage of drugs and do everything you can to decriminalize it.
You allow wealthy powerful people to remarry and break up poorer families.
You allow depraved bastards to declare children are sexual beings and watch as predators stalk them.
You allow drug companies to foist their drugs on children.
You allow the food industry to sell utter crap which they know is unhealthy.
Yeah I know it is an unbalanced list, and everyone would disagree with some of my statements.
But the fact is that smart powerful people have for a long time now had no motivation except making more money for themselves and they have preyed on poorer less intelligent people, all the while saying let’s give them what they want. And they have made millions by corrupting others and bleeding people morally dry and destroying them with false images and destructive ideas.
Unfortunately the best have become the worst, and it is a curse.
* When I looked into the dataset that Case and Deaton used and mixed it with Census Data, it appeared that there were three main predictors of county-level death rates for middle aged whites:
1) Median income
2) Obesity
3) SSI-Disability
It can’t be all economic, since income isn’t fully predictive by itself. And while rural counties have higher death rates overall, when you control for obesity and disability rates, population size of the county is no longer predictive. Marriage rates, and employment rates (controlling for income) aren’t strongly predictive, either.
My guess is that while the broader social changes may set the stage, uncontrolled pain management, perhaps worsened by obesity, isolation and sedentary lifestyles, and the ready availability of guns, liquor, and opioids to end the pain, are giving us this increase in mortality.
There’s a meta/methodological point here, that Steve has made a few times in different ways, but I think is worth drawing out. That is, the reason the NYTimes is doing this analysis of young adult white death rates is because Case & Deaton found the remarkable rise in middle-aged white death rates a few months ago, and the reason that the finding made such a stir was that Deaton had won the economics quasi-Nobel a few days before. But the data was just sitting around on the CDC’s web-site (and their article was rejected several times before being accepted by PNAS) largely unmentioned, not just because it was about white people’s problems (and who cares about them) but because social science is increasingly oriented towards what you might call “doing rather than knowing.” As Steve quoted in his article about the fraudulent UCLA Meet-a-Gay-Person-for-Twenty-Minutes-and-You’ll-Support-Gay-Marriage-for-Life study, “the point is not to understand the world but to change it.”
The UCLA study made a big stir because it was a massive (if imaginary) randomized controlled trial that appeared to show an Effective Way of Reducing Homophobia. The penchant towards RCTs goes beyond what is published in academic journals: an increasing fraction of federal spending in domestic policy and international development is targeted towards directing funds towards programs and policies which have evidence of success from randomized controlled trials. There are strong reasons for RCTs to be used– and in fact RCTs tend to have a rather conservative bias and indicate, when well-run, that most government programs are of null or negative use– but as a central or sole support for social science, they are deeply flawed. Before you can figure out how to change the world, you need to understand something about it, and part of that is just looking at the damn statistics all the agencies are collecting and trying to see the patterns. Focusing only on what can be done– on what rich people can do to poor people to make them different, as Deaton put it in a recent interview, is not only paternalistic but makes paternalism our only way of seeing the world. It also lessens our ability of conceiving a coherent picture of the world– there are merely random effects from one program or another, to be replaced ever onward with the next big thing.
As Steve often points out, the patterns of social phenomena are often clear, and interesting, and important for figuring out the kinds of things that might work or might make things worse. But you have to observe those patterns first, before trying to make them different.
* “People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
* You can bet that the proposed solution to this problem will involve making it harder than ever for me to get sudafed.
I do think this is something of a no brainer. People live because they feel like they need to be here: usually for their families, their kids, and so on. Sometimes other things, but unless you feel a strong need to get something done, the temptation to do nothing is strong. And doing nothing leads to sloth and boredom and anything that alleviates that, including anything from “drugs”, cough syrup, booze, you name it. Not to mention unemployment, obesity, disability, and on and on. I see this every day. There’s a certain segment of the population that doesn’t see any need to take care of itself, so it doesn’t, they blimp out and the next thing you know they’re dead at the age of 30. I can think of several cases just off the top of my head.
There aren’t a lot of jobs out there. For the less educated, little more than service jobs, which frankly isn’t normal for a lot of people. Unemployment, disability, and living in Mom’s attic is the result. Fewer marriages, fewer children, fewer homes, and no sense of community to keep you up to speed.
In my ’60′s I would prefer not having to jump through hoops to get allergy meds or mild opioids (at my age something is always hurting.) But that’s what the focus will be on, I guarantee it.
As per Durkheim (or Masaryk, or the sort of thing Jack London described in England), it was the rising suicide rate among the emerging working class that helped fuel “progressivism” 100-120 years ago. The same thing that fueled the drug laws in 1913, talk about eugenics, birth control, and of course prohibition. Most of that was a waste of time, too, because it’s really about having a social cohort that has no future, no hope, and few opportunities to meet basic social dignity requirements.
Fact is, most people aren’t going to be happy greeting shoppers at a department store, or asking people if they want fries with that, or working in a Dilbert type cubicle. Especially if they can’t have a home and a family on their salaries. We need to create a society where average and below average people can have those things. Otherwise, they will get the message and check out.
The cultural pessimism today is actually pretty intense. You reap what you sow.
* Of course a lot of working class people thought Reagan was great too. Reagan and Thatcher were both very charismatic people. They’ve remained popular in some groups because they were effective advocates to a wider audience for a certain ideology of business friendly conservatism. Did either of them ultimately do anything though that helped the native working classes in their countries in terms of immigration, trade, positive discrimination/affirmative action, unions or social cohesion? For all their talk about morals was it any harder to get an abortion by the end of their terms? Because I’d put forward that they were both disasters who weakened their people and did nothing to stop or reverse the erosion of the culture or identity within their countries. I can maybe understand why conservatives of a certain age are nostalgic about them, but defending or advocating for them seems like a wrongheaded waste of time.
* Why not both?
Conservative deregulation of the banks and liberal housing loan ‘affirmative action’ both helped create the banking crisis.
Conservative defunding of state universities and liberals encouraging everyone to go to college both helped create a generation of indebted kids.
Conservative desire for cheap labor (NOT UNZ READERS) and liberal desire for nonwhite votes both helped create millions of illegal immigrants.
Why can’t conservative destruction of unions and liberal destruction of families both kill blue-collar whites?
We tend to form tribes and go ‘Blue Team, Red Team’ and pick one as the good one and one as the bad one, but really, there are two coalitions of pressure groups that go after what they want, and it’s entirely possible for a group of people with nobody speaking for them to get screwed by both sides.
* Wife and Mother posts: Anecdotally, my younger sister, who is naturally beautiful, smart, and talented, has chosen drugs and social isolation. She is no longer beautiful, unless you’re into meth chic, and her brain is addled, but she can still create really interesting artwork. Someone mentioned SSI/disability. My mom got her on that years ago, for bipolar disorder. She also paid for an abortion my sister had, years ago.
My parents met as Socialists and raised us atheist and contemptuous of America and Western civilization. My dad even became a Muslim, not joking. Funnily enough, they used to really get into the Democratic presidential candidate every four years. I even got to shake Clinton’s hand as a teenager. My mom told me he was really eyeing me, ha.
I rescued myself through luck and grace. Luck because I lack a propensity for alcohol and drug addiction. Grace through suddenly being ‘struck by gratitude’ and realizing how amazingly lucky I was to enjoy health, freedom, security, and prosperity through so little effort of my own.
I glommed on to the NeoCon con but wised up while serving in Iraq. In response to my NCO offering career goodies, I told him, “The Army is not my priority. Serving my country is my priority, and I can best do that by having and raising children.”
Religion is problematic. I lack faith in Christianity, though I’m sentimentally attached out of ancestral loyalty, and it really is beautiful (the works of J.S. Bach….). Hippy-dippy spiritual stuff (e.g., Eckhart Tolle) is helpful and explanatory, though its practitioners err in assuming all peoples are equally evolved, IMO.
Does the West need to believe in Christianity in order to thrive? Aren’t the Northeast Asians doing fine, don’t they maintain ethnic loyalty and pride, without believing in some universalist religion?
* So a bunch of losers couldn’t hack it? Cry me a river.
This stuff doesn’t happen to the winners and beautiful people.
I’m not trying to be mean. Just stating facts.
Winners win. Losers lose.
Everyone on my social level is married with children and has a stable career.
* From what I’ve seen in my own circle, it seems being on SSD/SSI/railroad disability itself is the kiss of early death, even without obesity, drugs or booze. I don’t get it, but suspect a lot of people with marginal disability (no real disease or handicap) trend downward more quickly than those out working and learning new things all the time.
From the outside, though, they look like they “have it made,” to us worker drones.
* I never tire of pointing out how aggressively the medical field pushed increased access to painkillers in the 1990s. Don’t blame it on the drug companies — they were very happy to profit off selling the stuff but it really did spring first from academic medicine (perhaps we could blame the drug companies for aggressively spreading the trend out to community physicians, but it was going to happen anyway).
It strikes me that perhaps this is something like what Charles Murray identified with our elites not preaching what they practice and/or pushing things that work for the elite but not for normal folks. Having under-treated pain is horrible and if you’re in the elite the prospect of prescription drug abuse is small so there is only upside to more liberal prescription policies. It makes you less likely to ever suffer untreated pain. But that same trend reaches working class folks and causes as much destruction as benefit.
Another point is that pain relief and reduced suffering isn’t captured in mortality statistics so there is no way to know what the balance of costs and benefits is — the costs are dead people, the benefits are fewer and less miserable people that aren’t measured in any systematic way. I doubt that the benefit here outweighs the cost but it’s still an angle worth considering.
* The new morality is no match for the old we’ve destroyed.
Pot-smoking is just ubiquitous. People get their little 215 card, then start selling and sharing all around. They can even order it off the internet and get instant home delivery. I’ve got neighbors on both sides that are complete stoners (and I’m NOT sympathetic about whatever ailment they may have).
I wonder if the progress made on reducing tobacco smoking will be undone by all the pot smoking.
* People who were just high school grads, or less, used to be able to find jobs doing something and get a fair income. Not anymore, that’s all gone. Now it’s all service jobs that are low paid. A person can’t save anything on those wages and there’s no pensions so they’ll end up trying to live on perhaps $1200 p/mo Social Security when they get old. Poverty now, poverty later. Not everyone can be a yuppie. Half the population is either average or below average so for them there’s no going to law school or becoming CEOs. Having to continually smile and dance in a service job for every jerk who walks in for the next 30-40 years can be a depressing thought. That there’s so many who see applying for a once-a-month disability check as a survival strategy is telling enough. No present, no future, people just see getting high as a good way to get through the day.
* I live in a upper-middle class area – household incomes ~$140k to ~$200k – and I’ve never heard one person mention the plight of working-class whites. Never. And these are generally conservative, tech-job/management whites, with a few liberals sprinkled in.
Middle-aged, upper-middle class white men – at least in my area – with very good analytical skills have an amazing tunnel vision, as you called it. They seem completely oblivious to the larger consequences of having their lawns mowed by Hispanics, their meals cleaned up by Hispanics, their house worked on by a white foreman with Hispanics for lower-skill work, etc.
If it doesn’t impact their world, they don’t see it. They have no loyalty beyond their family. Heck, the concept that they should worry about their fellow whites seems as foreign to them as the concept that other ethnic groups do worry about members of their tribe.
I just don’t see how a racial/ethnic group like that will survive in a world of instant communication and cheap travel costs. No matter how talented a group may be (and whites are pretty damned talented), you can’t win a fight if you don’t show up. Heck, we don’t even know that we’re in a fight.
Maybe my friends and neighbors do harbor the same concerns as I do, but simply keep quiet about them. However, they know how I feel, and not one has ever told my, even in private, that they agree.
As the Derb says, We are Doomed!
* A couple of observations:
1. Black people HAVE a social network, its called GANGS. Hence less suicide. Even by drugs. There is also far less tendency among Blacks for suicide than Whites and Asians, well documented. A racial difference.
2. White women would prefer the tingles than beta male support. Or as Heartiste/Roissy noted, five minutes of Alpha beats five years of beta. Even among depressed working class areas, there are beta males who can provide beta male support. And why are not the prettiest of the young women in West Virginia and Ohio and Kentucky and Tennessee in White working class areas not migrating en-masse to Silicon Valley and landing themselves a nice, beta male provider engineer?
Women, and yes HBD’ers this includes pedastalized White women, would risk death for tingles than have security and safety. The only force known to man or woman that counteracts that is slut-shaming by other women. See Austen, Jane.
3. This situation seems eerily similar to the Yeltsin era disaster, where the Russian nation just drifted until Putin came in and restored nationalism and religion, including BTW a very Multiculturalist approach to religion. Which means jailing not only Pussy Riot for insulting Orthodox worshipers, but also anyone who insults Islam or Muslims.
The LAT today has a front page story on “Activists Stoke Homophobia in St. Petersburg.” The jist of the story is that a “homophobic wolf” as he he calls himself, Timur Bulatov, uses the St. Petersburg law banning promotion of homosexuality among minors to get gays and lesbians fired from their jobs. The law is rarely enforced but employers don’t like to take chances.
Buried lede — Bulatov is a devout … MUSLIM. Also the law in St. Petersburg served as the model for the law nationally.
4. Religion IS dead. What does the Catholic Church offer? Rapefugee Immavasion and Muslim worship. What does the Protestant church(es) offer? Rick Warren style weepy worship of Blacks and Third Worlders as sacred objects of racial redemption and White original sin, with variations found among mainline and evangelical Protestant groups. So too is nationalism, with NFL football and MLB a poor substitute for regional identity.
This is of course not set in stone, Putin’s example of reviving Russian nationalism with a very Multicultural Identity, requiring MUTUAL respect and enforcement, not just a one-way street, is instructive.
But that is how things stand now.
* Those people have thrown in the towel and have just given up on life. They’ve reached the point where waiting for a lousy disability check to arrive just one time each month is pretty much all they can look forward to from here on in. People die psychologically first and then later on physically.
* Whites have a belief that “kindness to strangers” will be rewarded with a higher place in heaven. Thus the young and able are off with NGOs to third world countries, or agitating for more Somali immigrants, or cheering on more affirmative action, etc.
