Wait, is your contention that the US can't have a series of worsening problems with drugs over the last 40-50 years as wages have stalled and the economy rotted?

That seems... Unreasonable.

If a problem is growing, every iteration should be the worst in history.

Except that we are pushing for the same old "solution" and apparently the problem is getting worse. That should be enough reason to do a u-turn on the war on drugs.

I am not so worried about drugs as I am about false advertising and lack of awareness. I agree with the main point though. We need to treat this as a health and wellness issue, not as a crime. At the very least, possession itself (yes I'm making a whole sale statement) should not be a crime. Now if folks start selling poorly labeled drugs, the seller I'm ok vilifying.

Discount the rhetoric, count the bodies

Agreed. See for instance https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/05/upshot/opioid... with a graph showing US drug overdose deaths are far higher now (well, as of 2016 estimated data) than ever before.

There are indeed many drug panics. This one is the real thing.

I had no idea that drug overdoses are the number 1 cause of mortaliy for people under 50 in the US. Ok I don't live there, and I know from the web and talking to US citizens it's not all as sunny&happy as some media wants the outside world to believe, but this sounds pretty bad. The NYT article wisely doesn't try to point to an underlying cause, anyone? Is it e.g. a worsening of socio-economic factors or is there more to it?

This isn't exclusive to the U.S. of course, but there's the pernicious view that they're "bad people", they make bad choices etc.

To this view I would reply with the idea, attributed to Socrates, that there is no such thing as "moral weakness", or that doing good and bad amounts to knowledge of what is good or bad or a lack of it (keeping in mind knowledge could be more than merely mental abstractions).

Now unless this idea can be disproven, how can "moral weakness" be used as a justification to ignore the plight of these people?

There's definitely more to it. This problem will continue regardless of the number of jobs available.

“ ... as long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel would always be assured a bottomless pool of new customers.” -Pynchon

Kids want to get high and they’re cheap?

Yes, this time is different -- since white people are dying, we suddenly feel sympathy. When blacks OD from crack, they were thrown into jail and treated like morally failed individuals. When whites die from heroin, we feel sympathy and want to treat them.

Mostly it's poor rural whites, most of whom arent all that deserving of much sympathy for other reasons, so most people even in New Hampshire aren't all that cranked up about it. What's mildly concerning to me is why so many have switched from the time-honored traditions of drinking and smoking away the depression of sad, broken hillbilly life and started bumping fentanyl.

I'm guessing opiates are more deadly than crack.

I’ve heard this argument many times now and I still fail to see how we’re feeling sympathy for these people. Every time this conversation is brought up I see 0 solutions and people that very low-key suggest these people have to die because coal must disappear, because outsourcing to China is good because we’re living in a global economy, because they vote Trump and they don’t share our liberal view of society and they might not like black people or feminists, etc.

I think the overall tone today is much more sympathetic than that surrounding the crack panic of the 90s, especially when the legal and political environments are compared (3 strike laws v complaints about Narcan expense seem to constitute the political extremes). However, I agree that the disturbing undercurrent of contempt for certain demographics is certainly quite prominent in the public discussion.

Those are some... pretty strange views. Where do you see them expressed?

One from this thread is fairly close to what they described.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427888

The not deserving of much sympathy really brings it home. After all, rural white hillbillies don't deserve sympathy, I guess? I'd say that's rather prejudiced and, no, I'm not white.

I think you might be... extrapolating a lot from this.