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Notes -
Missed this:
I'm not sure either. I first heard of the opioid crisis in 2016, and my strong impression is that's when most other people heard about it too. That's about when J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Ellegy came out, and Trump's campaign brought a lot of issues into the spotlight that had previously been pretty thoroughly ignored. I agree that there's probably no way to prove it, beyond an exhaustive trawl through the media's treatment of the drug issue.
I'm not claiming anything of the kind. My understanding is that the mainly-white opioid epidemic areas have all sorts of crime problems, theft, burglary, property crime, assaults, public intoxication, DUIs, fraud, looting, and so on. What they don't have is anywhere near the same level of violent crime, and especially murder. Like it or not, the evidence is quite clear. You can look up the counties with the highest murder rates, and they're predominantly black. Then you can look up the counties with the worst prescription opioid abuse, and they're predominantly white, and while their crime rates are generally pretty bad, they don't have super-high murder or violent-crime rates. That is a difference that matters for a lot of reasons, not an artifact of arbitrary bias.
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