How Opiate Use Disorder Made Our World "The Leftovers"
It's a public health nightmare, and we are all guilty remnants.
We have had our sense of normalcy ripped away. Cataclysms and whatever the plural of apocalypse would be have a long place in our mythology. They don't have an easy place in our day-to-day life.
Fiction writers have tried to approach the problem of grief, at unimaginable scales, before.
We have ancient stories to warn us—the flood! Modern mythologists, prior to the death of HBO1, presented unimaginable lost as the show, “The Leftovers.” Our current relentless grief is moving closer to that fiction. Those writers imagined enough loss would drive us mad.
I suspect they are correct. We are not prepared. We have lost our ability to mourn at scale.
I will focus, here, on drug related deaths. I’m skipping death by suicide. This omission is to allow narrative focus. However, the specter of death by suicide can and should loom behind everything you read.
The total death rate in the US for every cause in 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, was 835 per 100,000 people according t…