Report by Terry Gotham
This week’s edition of “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” is a look at a couple of different secondary effects of the opiate overdose epidemic that I don’t think are being given enough scrutiny. With Donald John Trump Jr. declaring a “state of emergency” but not promising any tangible resources, I thought it would be best to do the opposite. Dive into the nitty-gritty of two facets of the opiate epidemic that are so far out into the policy weeds that our president has probably never thought about them.
One of the more complex problems caused by the flood of fentanyl and fentanyl analogs is the difficulty in investigating overdose deaths. This is somehwat related to the explosion in complexity that ER staff are forced to cope with when it comes to determining what someone is overdosing from exactly. I spoke about this a while ago but only touched on the difficulties Emergency Rooms and hospitals are dealing with while working with the patient in vivo. But the work doesn’t stop there.