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A Slight Diversion on the Excess Death Topic

By January 2, 2023Commentary

We will likely get to some specific examples in the Minnesota data, but one great tragedy over the last couple of decades in the US is the number of children and adolescents dying of drug overdoses, suicides and homicides, often primarily affecting minority children.  The first two are often difficult to disentangle–did the teenager intend to kill themselves by taking the drug overdose, or did they just not understand how dangerous fentanyl is at any dose?  The bias of course is to call these overdoses “accidental poisonings”.  Here are a couple of quick posts or articles on the topic.

One, just lists some of the grim statistics, what a common source of death these causes are in our youngest populations.  The post includes not just children but young adults.  You can thank China and Mexican drug cartels for a lot of the overdose issues and I personally would be fine with the US using drones to take out every single asset of those drug cartels.  In fact we should.  The current administration’s completely open border policy is also a primary cause of the flood of fentanyl and other dangerous drugs found everywhere.   (ZH Post)

The second focuses on homicides in children, some very young.  There has been a large increase in the last couple of years, almost exclusively among minority children, the ones progressive whackos were so eager to lock out of schools.  As I can testify, in Minneapolis, this often involves very young children minding their own business in their homes getting hit by stray bullets.  As a said, a complete tragedy, and one largely caused by BLM and other defund the police idiots.  (JAMA Article)

Join the discussion One Comment

  • AnthonyD says:

    Four times in the last year I have had patients tell me that their child (usually between the ages of 25-40) died of a “heart attack” and, because the parent(s) have heart disease (and thus are my patients) they have assumed that coronary artery disease was indeed the cause of death. However a) mild to moderate coronary atherosclerosis is nearly ubiquitous in our population, and, when found at autopsy, many pathologists prematurely conclude that it was the cause of death even when there is no evidence of recent plaque rupture or acute coronary occlusion, b) the toxicology reports often take weeks after the preliminary anatomical report is finalized, and c) the family is told of the preliminary anatomical report before the toxicology confirms that the cause of death was opioid overdose. Thus, after I hunted down (with the parent’s permission) the FINAL autopsy report, I was the one to have to break the news to these heartbroken parents that “heart attack” was not the cause of their chid’s death. Instead, it was an opioid, most likely fentanyl.
    That our federal government allows HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of innocent US citizens to die of (overwhelmingly) unintentional opioid overdoses is arguably the worst failure of the current administration. The first and most fundamental function of government is to protect its law-abiding citizens. This failure is beyond tragedy, it is a farce, a shame, an abomination. It is government abdicating its most essential responsibility.

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