Poverty, Pain, and Pill Mills: Social Crisis and America’s Opioid Epidemic

The opioid epidemic is ravaging large swathes of America—from once-thriving Rust Belt communities to inner cities. So many lives have been lost to this crisis that annual opioid deaths in the U.S. now outnumber deaths due to breast cancer, and American life expectancy has fallen two years in a row. Even as the Trump administration pushes more policing as the solution, the drug manufacturers who deliberately misled the public about opioids continue to rake in millions in profit from human misery. This talk will look at the social roots of the opioid crisis and what a real plan to tackle the crisis might look like.