I've been reading this deeply flawed Brookings study (60 pg pdf) on morbidity and mortality in the 21st Century. It has so many problems it's almost useless, but it nicely fits the narrative of suffering, despairing rural white folks -- who elected Trump in their misery -- that it's become something of a go-to "proof" that white folks are dying in their multitudes (ostensibly from despair at their future-less lives.)
The statistics do not support the conclusion. The simple facts don't. But don't let that stand in the way of a good narrative.
The primary issue for the authors is the increase in opioid addiction leading to overdose deaths in rural America -- even though it is not the leading cause of death, but so what. It involves drugs, and everyone knows drugs are eeeeeevil.
There have been any number of reports that parts of rural (white) America have been flooded with prescription opioid pain killers; millions and millions of doses sent to pharmacies in areas that have populations in the tens of thousands if that. Surprisingly, these areas then experience a spike in opioid addiction and overdose death. How interesting.
The authors of the Brookings study, however, are careful to hold harmless the prescription drug manufacturers, pharmacies and doctors in those areas. The problems associated with opioids are entirely on the shoulders of the patients who, apparently, falsely claim to be in pain in order to procure a scrip, then trade the meds among themselves. Or something.
It really doesn't make sense given the already restricted access to opioids and other narcotic pain medications. And at least 9 times out of 10, patients presenting with pain are in pain, not "despair," real, physical pain, and the medication is intended and used for pain relief.
Yet the narrative says, "No, no! These people are not in physical pain. They suffer from Wypipo-despair!"
OK.
Interestingly, in other drug abuse frenzies (the crack epidemic, the crank era) nobody cared a whit about the why of such drug use. They wanted to see the users and their unpleasantness eradicated forthwith.
And so it was with the ever-present War on (some) Drugs and (some) Drug Users.
Now, though, the issue is Salt of the Earth Wypipo in rural communities who voted for Trump and all of a sudden, treatment, love and compassion for the despairing victim-users is the general attitude toward the Unfortunates.
No war on these people and their drug use at all. No sirree.
Except.
Well, there is an exception. What is being proposed and in some cases enacted are further tightening of the restrictions on the prescription and dispensing of opioid pain medications.
In other words, the point is not to "help" the victims -- poor, rural Wypipo that they are -- the point is to make it difficult or impossible for people in pain to legally obtain opioids for pain relief. There. That should solve the problem, right?
Jeebus.
In some areas it is already nearly impossible for people in pain to legally obtain opioid or other narcotic pain relief medication because doctors are terrified of the DEA and refuse to prescribe it -- or any effective medication for pain.
They refuse outright and patients are left on their own to find medications to deal with their pain -- or just live with it. Too bad, so sad. The proposed additional restrictions and prohibitions will simply mean that more people in pain will be refused medications to alleviate their suffering.
I think that's the point of the narrative. "Suffering is good for the soul," right?
Whatever else Our Rulers want to do, they want to impose sufficient suffering on the Rabble to keep them in line, and they want to punish anyone who gets out of line.
That's Doctrine.
Of course I have a personal interest in these things. Until recently, pain associated with my condition was fairly well controlled without specific medications for pain. But about two weeks ago, I started having what they call a "flare," something that hasn't happened since before I started treatment, and it lasted a good long time, despite attempts to mitigate/control the pain with steroids. I received no pain medication at all.
Steroids alone were supposed to be enough to control the pain, but they weren't. What was happening was that generalized joint pain would concentrate in one joint or pair of joints and at one point I could not walk because of the intensity of pain. Standard pain killers like Aleve had no effect.
As it happened, I had some left-over pain medication from a previous bout of sciatica, and sure enough, within minutes of taking it, the pain was controlled.
But it's an opioid, and it was never offered by my doctor -- nothing was -- for pain relief, only the steroids, which did not control the concentrated joint pain that made basic functioning impossible.
According to what I'm being told, my condition has "evolved" into a new and more serious phase that requires more aggressive treatment with stronger immunosuppressants an other drugs that can have serious or fatal side effects. But that's how it goes. I'm not as concerned about that as I am about being stuck in a painful situation (another "flare" for example) without access to effective relief.
Given the urge of policy-makers to further restrict or prohibit the use of opioids for pain relief, I wouldn't be surprised...
[This Politico article explores some of the criticism of the Brookings study. Still, the general thrust of it is accepted.]
Showing posts with label drug war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drug war. Show all posts
Thursday, April 6, 2017
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Have We Finally Passed the Tipping Point on Police Violence?
Ms Ché and I have been involved in a number of literary and other adventures during April, "National Poetry Month," as it's called. We've attended quite a few poetry readings and we've enjoyed expeditions to museums of art and science, with more to come. Soon enough, planting will start and outdoor activities and adventures will take the place of mostly indoor ones. The world-cycle will continue.
I've written here mostly about the national issue-problem of police violence and murder which takes on average three lives a day, week and month in and week and month out, with uncounted numbers brutalized and injured, physically and psychologically damaged each and every day, all through this land, in a cataclysm of violence that leaves ruined lives, ruined families and ruined communities in its bloody wake.
I've compared the casualty numbers to those of a low-key but continual civil war, with more than a thousand dead and tens of thousands injured each and every year. Overall homicide rates are much higher than the rate of killings by police, however. Police involved homicides are generally about 10% of the total; in some jurisdictions they are 20% or more, but those tend to be exceptions. What makes these statistics striking is that there are no more than one million sworn officers and fewer than that are patrolling the streets -- and killing people in the process. In other words, the seeming epidemic of police violence is being committed by a relative handful of Americans, a tiny percentage of police are responsible for a relatively large percentage of homicides.
Media coverage of the issue has grown substantially over the past years -- especially since the killing of James Boyd in Albuquerque in March of 2014, and the subsequent demonstrations against police violence. The media's narrative on events surrounding police violence and the protests against it has a presumptive start date in August of 2014, with the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO. The earlier Albuquerque incident(s) and protests have been -- for the most part -- vanished from the narrative, in part, I suspect, because James Boyd was white and mentally ill, and the narrative of the "national conversation" that's been going on asserts that it is about police violence against "unarmed young black men" and essentially nothing else.
That's an important aspect of police violence, but it is not the only one. Police are violent against any perceived "Other," including young black men in general, other racial minorities, the poor and the homeless in general, anyone who doesn't fit a very narrow model of appearance and behavior, or who is mentally ill, or is engaged in a domestic dispute, or who fails to obey sufficiently or fast enough to satisfy the violent officer.
Summary executions are being committed day in and day out, typically without any lasting consequence to the police officer.
As the outrage has grown, there is a perception that the rate of killing has risen. In some jurisdictions, that's happened, but I'm not sure it's true overall. In fact, given the police killings documented so far this year, I'm seeing a slight but perceptible decrease in the overall rate of police killings, and in some jurisdictions, such as Albuquerque, the rate of police killing is dramatically lower this year than last or years prior to the advent of persistent and large-scale protest against it.
In other words, the killing can be stopped. In some places it has been stopped, or nearly so.
Stopping police violence is possible, and the world won't end.
Making sure that happens is the necessary objective of the movements against police violence that have arisen all over the country.
As we've gone about our literary and other adventures this month, I've been struck with how this issue simply doesn't enter into the minds and works of most of those whose slim volumes of poetry are being hawked at every reading we've attended. Nope. There are some exceptions, true. The slam poets make more of it than more traditional literary artists do. But even the slam poets seem less inclined to deal with the issue of police violence than is warranted.
Yet yesterday we were at a poetry reading in rural New Mexico, featuring what I would characterize as semi-Cowboy Poetry more than any other style. None of it touched on the issue of police violence, not directly, but some of it was of the "rebel" variety. Most of the readers (all of them?) were older, near or past 70, some from the rural South, one from DC, one from Upstate New York, a couple from California, one born and raised in New Mexican. All but one was white, and the one that wasn't -- Ms Ché herself, in fact -- was Native American.
Topics ranged from horses and pigs and cats and dogs to loves gained and lost, stars sparkling in the sky, memoirs of temps perdu, and the ways of the Divine among others.
After the reading there was an open discussion which turned almost immediately to the drug war and the lives taken and ruined by its continuance. There was a nearly universal understanding that this drug war had to stop, and with its end the ruin would stop. Here we were in rural New Mexico, amid a bunch of old coots who didn't necessarily write about the killing spree that has been the topic of so many of my posts of late, but who understood fully that the killing is a consequence of a "War" declared decades ago that has literally destroyed lives and families and communities in pursuit of a "victory" that can never be won. It's insane and it must stop. Even these old folks understand that.
I was moved.
Have we finally passed the tipping point?
I'm still not sure, but the signs yesterday were suggestive that the answer is "yes."
Rallies and protests will and must continue, but more and more, the people have had enough, and the message is getting through to the barricaded high and mighty and their servants that police violence is unacceptable and must be brought under control and ended. The consequences of not doing so include "shutting shit down," which has been a widely utilized and effective strategy. More and more "People's Courts" have been holding public mock trials of killer police and their protectors, and more and more police precincts have been put under scrutiny and siege. Police are seen more and more as the problem not the solution.
And it is being shown that police violence and militarization, much of which is a direct result of the continuing (so called) drug-and-terror war must come to an end.
It's encouraging...
I've written here mostly about the national issue-problem of police violence and murder which takes on average three lives a day, week and month in and week and month out, with uncounted numbers brutalized and injured, physically and psychologically damaged each and every day, all through this land, in a cataclysm of violence that leaves ruined lives, ruined families and ruined communities in its bloody wake.
I've compared the casualty numbers to those of a low-key but continual civil war, with more than a thousand dead and tens of thousands injured each and every year. Overall homicide rates are much higher than the rate of killings by police, however. Police involved homicides are generally about 10% of the total; in some jurisdictions they are 20% or more, but those tend to be exceptions. What makes these statistics striking is that there are no more than one million sworn officers and fewer than that are patrolling the streets -- and killing people in the process. In other words, the seeming epidemic of police violence is being committed by a relative handful of Americans, a tiny percentage of police are responsible for a relatively large percentage of homicides.
Media coverage of the issue has grown substantially over the past years -- especially since the killing of James Boyd in Albuquerque in March of 2014, and the subsequent demonstrations against police violence. The media's narrative on events surrounding police violence and the protests against it has a presumptive start date in August of 2014, with the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO. The earlier Albuquerque incident(s) and protests have been -- for the most part -- vanished from the narrative, in part, I suspect, because James Boyd was white and mentally ill, and the narrative of the "national conversation" that's been going on asserts that it is about police violence against "unarmed young black men" and essentially nothing else.
That's an important aspect of police violence, but it is not the only one. Police are violent against any perceived "Other," including young black men in general, other racial minorities, the poor and the homeless in general, anyone who doesn't fit a very narrow model of appearance and behavior, or who is mentally ill, or is engaged in a domestic dispute, or who fails to obey sufficiently or fast enough to satisfy the violent officer.
Summary executions are being committed day in and day out, typically without any lasting consequence to the police officer.
As the outrage has grown, there is a perception that the rate of killing has risen. In some jurisdictions, that's happened, but I'm not sure it's true overall. In fact, given the police killings documented so far this year, I'm seeing a slight but perceptible decrease in the overall rate of police killings, and in some jurisdictions, such as Albuquerque, the rate of police killing is dramatically lower this year than last or years prior to the advent of persistent and large-scale protest against it.
In other words, the killing can be stopped. In some places it has been stopped, or nearly so.
Stopping police violence is possible, and the world won't end.
Making sure that happens is the necessary objective of the movements against police violence that have arisen all over the country.
As we've gone about our literary and other adventures this month, I've been struck with how this issue simply doesn't enter into the minds and works of most of those whose slim volumes of poetry are being hawked at every reading we've attended. Nope. There are some exceptions, true. The slam poets make more of it than more traditional literary artists do. But even the slam poets seem less inclined to deal with the issue of police violence than is warranted.
Yet yesterday we were at a poetry reading in rural New Mexico, featuring what I would characterize as semi-Cowboy Poetry more than any other style. None of it touched on the issue of police violence, not directly, but some of it was of the "rebel" variety. Most of the readers (all of them?) were older, near or past 70, some from the rural South, one from DC, one from Upstate New York, a couple from California, one born and raised in New Mexican. All but one was white, and the one that wasn't -- Ms Ché herself, in fact -- was Native American.
Topics ranged from horses and pigs and cats and dogs to loves gained and lost, stars sparkling in the sky, memoirs of temps perdu, and the ways of the Divine among others.
After the reading there was an open discussion which turned almost immediately to the drug war and the lives taken and ruined by its continuance. There was a nearly universal understanding that this drug war had to stop, and with its end the ruin would stop. Here we were in rural New Mexico, amid a bunch of old coots who didn't necessarily write about the killing spree that has been the topic of so many of my posts of late, but who understood fully that the killing is a consequence of a "War" declared decades ago that has literally destroyed lives and families and communities in pursuit of a "victory" that can never be won. It's insane and it must stop. Even these old folks understand that.
I was moved.
Have we finally passed the tipping point?
I'm still not sure, but the signs yesterday were suggestive that the answer is "yes."
Rallies and protests will and must continue, but more and more, the people have had enough, and the message is getting through to the barricaded high and mighty and their servants that police violence is unacceptable and must be brought under control and ended. The consequences of not doing so include "shutting shit down," which has been a widely utilized and effective strategy. More and more "People's Courts" have been holding public mock trials of killer police and their protectors, and more and more police precincts have been put under scrutiny and siege. Police are seen more and more as the problem not the solution.
And it is being shown that police violence and militarization, much of which is a direct result of the continuing (so called) drug-and-terror war must come to an end.
It's encouraging...
Sunday, January 11, 2015
Blue on Blue
There have been two blue on blue police shootings in New Mexico in the last few months.
The first one, in Las Cruces, involved two Santa Fe County deputies who apparently got drunk on their way back from Arizona where they had deposited a prisoner. One shot the other in the back as he got on the elevator while talking on the phone with his girlfriend at the hotel where the the two officers were staying; the elevator went down to the lobby where the wounded officer was found by other hotel guests. The officer died of his wounds.
The shooter was taken into custody, but the reason for the shooting remains a mystery.
More recently, an undercover drug sting in Albuquerque went awry and two officers were apparently shot by another officer, one was critically wounded. The drug suspects were apprehended, apparently without a further incident.
This happened in the parking lot at a McDonald's around lunchtime, but as far as I can determine, none of the patrons witnessed the shooting itself, as it apparently took place behind the place, out of view of the folks inside having their McFood nuggets and such.
Nevertheless, it has caused quite a stir in the region because the whole thing seems so outrageous.
How two cops got shot by another in the course of apprehending two drug sting suspects over a $60 meth purchase is a mystery. "Under investigation...." Right. That it happened where and when it did is perhaps the more troubling for ordinary Burqueños. This location, on Central near Tramway, is a high traffic area, and a McDonald's at lunchtime is where a lot of people will be found, no matter where it is.
According to reports, the suspects were driven to the McDonald's parking lot by the undercover officer who shot the other two officers. Apparently the shooter, whose name has been inadvertently revealed, signaled the start of the apprehension to the officers waiting in the parking lot, they approached the car with their guns drawn, and she -- the shooting officer -- fired on them, lightly wounding one, critically wounding the other.
WTF?
Really, WTF?
Trigger happy police are so out of control, they're now firing on anything and anyone who "approaches" -- the term of art is "lunges at" -- them in a "threatening" manner, whether or not they are armed (often they are not), and now, apparently, whether or not they're on the same team...
WTF?
The oddness here -- among so many oddities and perfect lack of judgement -- is that all of the officers involved in this botched operation were long-time APD undercover detectives, and it is almost impossible to imagine that they didn't know one another and that the shooter couldn't recognize her compadres. Maybe they were masked. And further, the site of this shooting was the chosen site for the sting. Surely she knew that the other officers were there and waiting for her to arrive, and surely she would know they would approach the car with guns drawn, yelling obscenities, and all roided up.
At any rate... oops.
But it goes to the trigger-happiness police have been showing all over the place.
"Inappropriate."
In Billings, MT the other day, an officer who shot and killed an unarmed suspect while he was sitting in the backseat of a car the officer had stopped was ruled "justified" -- because the suspect (apparently tweaking) was moving around and didn't follow commands to keep his hands on the back of the seat in front. The video is quite clear that the suspect -- Richard Ramirez -- is posing no threat; the officer is the threat, indeed he is a clear and present danger to everyone's life and limb as he barks his commands with gun drawn and assuming a shooting stance.
Ramirez is apparently rattled -- gee, ya think? -- and tries to comply, but cannot; instead, he's agitated and obviously frightened to death. When he fails to comply with the officer's barked commands, the officer shoots him three times at nearly point blank range, and then inexplicably the officer continues to order his compliance or he will shoot Ramirez again. Ramirez, of course, is mortally wounded and could not physically comply if he wanted to.
This shooting of an unarmed suspect was the officer's second to be ruled "justified" because... something about hands, waistbands, feared for his life, split-second decisions, that sort of thing.
"Inappropriate."
Inappropriate, but -- once again -- "justified."
How the APD will sort out the most recent police involved shooting -- the blue on blue misadventure at the McDonald's -- is anyone's guess at this point. The initial report by APD made it seem that somehow the suspects were shooting. It was only hours later that the emotional police chief, standing with the distraught mayor, said it was another officer who shot and critically wounded the undercover cop. It was hours after that that the public learned that yet another officer had been wounded in the incident.
So, it's clear they are prepared to dissemble and obfuscate in "piecing together what happened."
Unfortunately, because this dissembling and obfuscation is as standard as paid administrative leave in cases of police involved shootings, we may never know fully what happened or why.
But we will never forget it was "inappropriate."
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