Where have all the workers gone?

[Mike]

[posted on behalf of Dave Grubb who was having technical problems starting a new thread. This was to see if it was a global problem.]

Often mentioned here, for various reasons, has been the large numbers of people who simply are not participating in the workforce. While the general claim as to that cause has been routed in politics (right/left) it has become abundantly clear there is a real---identifiable cause---opioids.

Executive Summary

This study examines the labor market and economic consequences of the opioid crisis. While previous studies have estimated economic costs of the opioid epidemic, none has taken into account the most significant way opioid dependency is likely impacting the U.S. economy: its impact on labor force participation. This study measures the direct cost on the economy of opioids leading workers out of the labor force. Specifically, it estimates the number of workers who are absent from the labor force due to opioids, the loss of hours at work, and the resulting decline in real output. It finds:

In 2015, 919,400 prime-age individuals were not in the labor force due to opioids;
Between 1999 and 2015, the decline in labor force participation cumulatively cost the economy 12.1 billion work hours; and
During that period, the reduction in work hours slowed the real annual economic growth rate by 0.2 percentage points, cumulatively costing $702.1 billion in real output.

If you don’t like this source, there are many more from which you can choose, all with the same story.
This is particularly hard hitting in the 25 to 35 year old age group that should be going into the skilled trades---they simply are not there.

[Billy_Rightwing]

I've been told back in our lumber boom industry when it was against the law not to work there were around 4% unemployed you couldn't get off there butts.

[Dave Grubb]

I don't believe this million are counted in the 4% calculation.

[mgrist]

Somebody probably took a year to write that and got paid through salary or prestige. Opioids eh? It makes a good scape goat. I've been there for over fifty years, either on them around them or working to get people off them. let me say that I'll need you to help me in that don't read a part and forget the rest. On opioids work increases exponentially it is like speed to 90% of the population. Memory slips but I could still build a house. I can not tell you how many employers passed out speed or opiods at the beginning of the day. It is actually wonderful stuff but only the pharmaceutical stuff. The powder on the street will kill you. Alcohol by far in my experience screws up more than anything else. Withdrawal from any of it will screw up a good day, opiods will not. This whole thing is a lot of government hyperbole, like every thing else they do they have an agenda but it's not opiods they have allowed more opiods onto the street than Mexico. The pharmaceutical companys are dumping that stuff on the the streets by the billions of pills breaking dozens of laws in the process with total immunity. Xanax, Valium, damn, hundreds of other drugs will screw up a work day more than opioids will. Some idiot on the second floor dropping 2x4's on your head because of that joint he smoked at lunch screws up things more than opioids.
Yes the are the bridge people, there are people that have been over taken by it, like some have been caught by ice/meth downers. We have been brain washed, the government said it, it must be true. Ray Charles was hooked on Heroin for 19 years through the prime of his career. I expect 1 out of a hundred to believe any of this. We've been indoctrinated since birth, facts change nothing.
The nurses when I was in the hospital for three months wouldn't give me my meds, they said that much would kill me. Half a dozen times I had to have the doctors demand that I get my proper dosage from the nurses. These are trained nurses that were scared to death of opioids, scared that they were going to kill me. They believed what they were told and the facts didn't matter.
Withdrawel is tough but a week without and 2 Xanax a day and tou'll be fine in a week maybe two if it's really bad. Instead they give you methadone that has a half life of 109 hours. Normal dose for that is 40 mgs twice a day. By the end of the week you have (screw the math) a 1000 mgs in your system, it can take years to get off it and its horrible! Normal opiods have a 4.5 hour half life it's gone by morning, there's no build up. With what I take in opiods now if I was to get cut off with no help I'd die. I'd die because of the combination of opioids and Xanax. Methadone being the main culprit. To much of anything is not good for you, the decline is in the workforce no doubt but quit trying to make excuses for the last three generations of lazy bastards who have to be throw out of their parents house.

[Dork]

Bull****, the opiod crisis is a man made thing, its not as serious as J waling crisis, kids not in car seat circus or any of 100 more crisis waiting in the wings to divert attention, increase the price of pills, make them more and more non avaible....

Pot smokers are lazy, not wanting to work, not wanting to do anything but chill and smoke pot....but it's politically correct to smoke pot and ignore all the problems it creates while lying and blaming it on something else....

Just wait till your sick, hurting and need opiods and they are impossible to get, stupid expensive, your labeled a drug seeker for wanting or asking for them....

Don't think it cant and is not happening, it's happening now, quality of life for chronic pain people is dropping, it's politically correct to make them suffer and live a shortened life...to be ignored...

Wait till you hurt, till you get cancer and are denied pain meds.....all cuz politicians and weak minded people think they know what's better for you than the doctors...

[Dave Grubb]

The Link got lost in the process of getting the original posting up.

If you don't care for that source here is a long list of others.

[Dork]

Just wait, when the number of people out of work due to taking away opiod pain medicine from them & forcing them into wheel chairs, on disability and such is really known. Nobody is tracking these numbers,

Nobody is tracking the numbers of people removed from legal opiod pain med for chronic pain and what happens to them, where do they turn, where do they go.

I know you will blow it off as I'm saying it. I know several providers at the VA hospital, they are seeing more and more increase in ETOH consumption as well as pot smoking to offset the VA taking away pain meds. Find a VA hospital and go talk to them, check out the RRTP programs and see who attends and wy and how the numbers are doing.

Nothing like having spinal stenosis, not a candidate for surgery and having your pain meds removed and not being able to walk any more.....however, if you had pain management with opioids you could walk.....(I had 2 providers tell me about 3 patients this has happened to in the last month)

I've personally had thousands of dollars of taxpayers money spent on me in search for alternate pain control methods and due to that get to go to Physical Therapy once a week, Acupuncture one a week as well as a AO Chiropractor once a week...and none of them in town. I've got to drive 60 miles today one way for the Chiropractor and not only does the VA pay the bone cracker, they pay my millage to and from the appointment.

That's not counting my Pain Management doctor that's outside of the VA, the Quell device I'm wearing now....it all adds up and while some of it is worth it, not all is...but who cares when you spending the tax payers dollar....

All becuze of the war on opiods and to keep from giving me 60 10mg Vicodin tabs a year....

Thank you taxpayers.........

The Link got lost in the process of getting the original posting up.

If you don't care for that source here is a long list of others.

[Dork]

http://www.samefacts.com/2018/05/drug-policy. Go to A primer on fentanyl(s)

The synthetic opioids – usually referred to both in the press and by law enforcement as “fentanyl” – have now outstripped not only the prescription opioids such as oxycodone but also heroin in terms of overdose deaths, and (as you can see below) the trend line is almost vertical.

The opioids as a class have what is known as a “narrow therapeutic window,” where the “window” is the range between the median effective dose (ED50) – the dose that’s has the desired effect in half the population – and the median lethal dose (LD50). The larger the LD50/ED50 ratio (the wider the “window”) the safer the drug will be in terms of overdose risk.

For the opioids, the ratio (also called the “therapeutic index”) is typically about six, which sounds like a reasonable margin of safety until you remember that individuals differ, that individual vulnerabilities differ from occasion to occasion (especially with the presence of other drugs, notably alcohol), and that people make mistakes, especially when drugs are made and distributed illicitly rather than in pharmaceutical factories and taken by people who are not always operating at their cognitive peak. Given all that, a factor of six is an uncomfortably narrow window.

The narrow therapeutic window explains why overdose death is so much more common with the opiods than with the stimulants or the benzos or alcohol. And the smaller the intended dose, the harder it is to measure out precisely. So high potency, which can be an advantage clinically (allowing less painful injections and the use of things like transdermal patches) can be a nightmare on the street. To make things even worse, neither users nor dealers have reliable ways of knowing just what’s in the white powder they’re consuming or selling: someone who injects what he thinks is the right dose of heroin, but has in fact purchased fentanyl, is likely to stop breathing. Even someone who intends to take fentanyl could die if he’s actually been given, say, 3-methylfentanil or some other high-potency analogue.

Which – finally – brings us back to Kevin’s question: “Why is this stuff just getting popular now?” Fentanyl was patented as a pharmaceutical nearly 60 years ago. It was in limited use as a street drug – some diverted from medical use, some illicitly synthesized (back then, mostly domestically) by the early 1980s. From a trafficker’s viewpoint, high potency meant high value-to-bulk, making it much easier to ship illegally without getting caught. But from a user’s viewpoint, it was Russian Roulette. A street dealer buying fentanyl from a higher-level supplier and “stepping on it” – diluting it with mostly inert chemicals – would have needed remarkable skill to ensure that every dose had just 50 micrograms of the active agent and that none had the 300 micrograms – roughly the weight of a grain of table salt – that could be deadly. So fentanyl never really caught on.

[mgrist]

What he said.
Heroin by the way, just plain heroin is the best pain killer with the least side effects of any drug made. The least disabling effects etc... If you supply a drug addict with methadone, if you give him his dose every day you will own him, literally! Why would somebody trying to help another person get off drugs give the recipient a drug that is ten fold more dangerous and ten fold more addictive. I started a year ago getting off of the methodone, it's given to me as a pain pill. I may be half way there. I can get off of the hydromorphone in a week. Hydromorphone is Dilaudid which is at the top of the list for bad ass drugs. I get 72 MG's a day. If you go into the hospital with a locked up back balled up in a knot and screaming they will give you a shot of 2 MG's I guess you see why the nurses scream about giving me my drugs, it takes me a week to get off them. I've been on them for years my tolerance is high. The 90 MG'S of methodone I'm been trying to stop for a year and I'm not even half way there. Hope that it's not the republicans that finally take away a dying mans relief.

[Dave Grubb]

I am sorry for your problems Mike and I know that there are others like you that need the pain relief offered by opioids---but that is not what this thread was about. This thread is about the million or so that are addicted to opioids, not from a need for pain relief, but to escape the reality of life.

This is a serious issue in our society today and denying that realty doesn't help to correct it.

[Dork]

Why is the only solution to take away the only thing that works for pain relief and to give them some quality of life.

Why not hold the drug addicts personally responsible instead of punishing those who need/depend on a few piils a day to work and lead a productive life.

Why punish everybody, why punnish Mike for what some drug addict does and will keep on doing...just using a different method......

It's not the military, you do not hold everybody responsible for the actions of a few........

I am sorry for your problems Mike and I know that there are others like you that need the pain relief offered by opioids---but that is not what this thread was about. This thread is about the million or so that are addicted to opioids, not from a need for pain relief, but to escape the reality of life.

This is a serious issue in our society today and denying that realty doesn't help to correct it.

[mgrist]

I am sorry for your problems Mike and I know that there are others like you that need the pain relief offered by opioids---but that is not what this thread was about. This thread is about the million or so that are addicted to opioids, not from a need for pain relief, but to escape the reality of life.

This is a serious issue in our society today and denying that realty doesn't help to correct it.

I know what your saying Dave but the government in all their knowledge won'd just take the pills from drug addicts they will restrict them from everybody. There will be all kinds of restrictions on me and the people like me but none on the drug companys that are dumping tons of pills on the streets. 60 minutes did a really informative segment on opioids. There was one little drug store in West Virginia that got more oxy conton than the whole state of Tennessee. Those little "Pharmacies" are all over the place and what the drug companys are doing is illegal. One by not reporting the million pills sent to a 10 by 10 building with one pharmacist that doesn't stock anything else except xanax. Everybody is getting rich, the truly needy are suffering and the addicts are robbing you and me and getting all they want and the government knows it but won't do anything. They interviewed people from the DEA and other agencies who are told over and over to back off. The people standing on the soap box are getting rich while telling you and me that we have to fight this epidemic. The same epidemic they are creating.

[mgrist]

I think I got this right, one of them at least is the correct link and it goes way past just this link, it's the only one I can remember right now.

http://nationalpainreport.com/did-yo...y-8828001.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-dea-...-and-congress/

[Dave Grubb]

Mike, I understand your concern. However, doing nothing isn't a reasonable response. While there are those like you who need the medication to sustain some level of pain relief there are far more who are abusing these drugs. That little pharmacy in WV wasn't shipping pills to people with valid need and prescriptions.

Simply in human terms---forgetting the economic impact for the moment, on average 115 people are dying everyday because of this. There is no argument as to the guilty but the guilty aren't going to fix this because they have been identified.

I don't believe anyone is suggesting that there is no need to continue to assure access to these drugs by those with justifiable need, certainly not me.

[wacojoe]

If you missed the article below the first time I posted it, you might find it informative as it tracks the Sackler family-owned Purdue Pharma, which developed and promoted OxyContin even as they (they are a family of doctors) knew their product was generating a vast number of people hopelessly and helplessly addicted to their product. There is no question the drug and ones similar can be very beneficial if use correctly, but to the sellers can make a lot more money if also used incorrectly. They had every financial incentive to take advantage of the addictive characteristics of their opiate, and they did...in spades...all the while lying like dogs about it.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...empire-of-pain