In Patrick’s home state of New Hampshire, which leads the country in deaths per capita from fentanyl, almost 500 people died of overdoses in 2016. The government estimates that 10 percent of New Hampshire residents — about 130,000 people — are addicted to drugs or alcohol. The overall burden to the state, including health care and criminal justice costs and lost worker productivity, has ballooned into the billions of dollars.
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Live free or die
The New York Times has a piece on a drug addict in New Hampshire. The live free or die state. So this is ironic:
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I don't see the irony. The drugged people are choosing the "die" part of the motto.
ReplyDeleteTh irony comes in the superior attitude of the rightwing New Hampshirites who adopted that ridiculous mott as an insult to he liberals in Vermont.
ReplyDeleteThe live free or die motto (it's on the car license plates) never meant anything real. nobody was living freer in NH, and for sure nobody was dying for lack for freedom. The message was, we are rugged individualists and so we live better than you socialists.
ReplyDeleteNow we see what an antisocial community looks like: they really are dying now, though not for freedom, and even while they live they are in thrall to drugs.
Another libertarian nightmare
Well, Harry, from my far away point of view, the differences from NH to Vermont are all too small. Both will have drugged people dying, whatever their smallish differences in welfare system and mottos.
ReplyDeleteI think so as well but NH has as noisy (and noisome) libertarian faction that emphasizes difference.
ReplyDeleteThe US has a homogeneous culture; even Hawaii is more like the rest of the country than it is different; but it is true that there are non-trivial differences in most measures of social welfare between the gun-totin', anti-gummint, aggrieved sections and the rest, almost all of them to the advantage of the more socially conscious sections. The places with the high opioid death tolls are almost all Trump country.
The South lags everywhere else in everything although that gap has narrowed a lot. NH has a Southern ethos; it (like Idaho) is one of the those non-Southern states where you see a lot of Confederate flags.