2015-11-02

Don't Do Drugs

I often catch a lot of grief for my stance against drug use. My stance is a simple one: Doing drugs will make your life a lot worse, period. People like to raise all sorts of objections to this, but the data that keeps coming in seems to substantiate my beliefs. It is not, however, clear and unambiguous empirical fact. It is a tendency I have noticed, as have many others over the years. If you do not want to see this tendency, it will become invisible to you.

But it is not invisible.
The mortality rate for white men and women between the ages of 45 and 54 with less than a college education increased by half a percent per year between 1999 and 2013, most likely because of problems with legal and illegal drugs, alcohol and suicide, according to the study released in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
And:
“Drugs and alcohol, and suicide . . . are clearly the proximate cause,” said Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics, who co-authored the paper with his wife, Anne Case. Both are economics professors at Princeton University. 
“Half a million people are dead who should not be dead,” he added. “About 40 times the Ebola stats. You’re getting up there with HIV-AIDS.”

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