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Notes -
What's the denominator for those numbers? I'm reading that Central Australia has only about 40K people, 43% Aboriginal + Torres Strait, so call that 17K, so 7/17K gives a drug-overdose-per-100K rate of 41 ... which is higher than the USA (32/100K in 2022) but not by nearly as much as you'd hope. The US already has demographics with worse rates (and I'm talking "males", not anything with p-hacked granularity), and our rates are still increasing, not dropping by 95%. A lot of the increase is fentanyl, but cocaine and meth are going way up too.
I'm not shocked that people use drugs and a minority of them OD. I get that for opioids and meth.
But this is serious talk about an "epidemic" of huffing gasoline. That's horrible and so much worse than an American who sometimes does a bit of coke.
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