sam quinones a fantastic journalist i work fo worked fore paper has written many books as put in theamazing chronicle of this epidemic called dreamland and if you have not read it i highly recommend it. it is a fabulous and touching and tragic book. doctor larissa mooney runs and addiction clinic at ucla and helps doctors learn how to cope with some of the victims of the epidemic and has done research into some medication responses to. he has seen quite a bit of the risky and dangerous side of the problem and has endeavored to try to attack it from that and. i will start off by saying i first began looking at the opioid epidemic as a prescription drug epidemic in 2010. i joined some colleagues at the paper and began looking at the problem. over the last 15 years more than 200,000 people have died of drug deaths in this country. most of them are prescription opioids but increasingly on a harrowing and they are closely linked. there are 20 million people currently addicted in the country to legal and illegal drugs and only about 10% of them manage to get treatment underfunded and not t

sam quinones in "dreamland" pointed out that many of those who are addicted get their prescriptions paid for by medicaid. nick eberstad in a recent commentary piece had this wonderful phrase, he said this means that dependence on government has thus come to take on an entirely new meaning. that medicaid is making people dependent on drugs. but there's another part of this story which is who really benefits. you know, follow the money. and according to the los angeles times who did a long investigative journalist into this, purdue pharmaceutical earned $31 billion from oxycontin and other opioids have whoar killed 200,000 people w would otherwise be alive if those drugs had not been licensed. medicaid is giving them money to the family and 200,000 people are incidental casualties. it seems to me that it's so impossible to exclude government from health care and that we uniquely in the rich world have a system that's part private and part public and such a system has exquisitely designed to give opportunities for seeking, it's very bad at delivering health. one one of the lowest life expec