[pardoned_turkey]

In private life, we probably do more "dumb things" than we used to. The number of people dying in car accidents or due to drug overdoses is absolutely staggering and is a fairly recent phenomenon. The gains from banning lawn darts and no longer using fire grenades are inconsequential in comparison.

To be fair, workplace safety has improved quite a bit - some of it thanks to regulation, some due to economic shifts (less mining, more office work). This improved the life expectancy of lower-class men.

But that aside, a lot of the gains in life expectancy have to do with very basic things - like flush toilets, along with generally improved standards of living.

[a_gnostic]

Can't have workplace accidents, if your factory moved to China…

[lostlogin]

> The number of people dying in car accidents or due to drug overdoses is absolutely staggering and is a fairly recent phenomenon.

If you don’t call alcohol poisoning a drug overdose, the stats get skewed to make the past look better.

[Retric]

Alcohol poisoning was and is quite rare. Plenty of long term health issues from drinking and smoking, but we don’t consider diseases from shared needles as an overdose either.

~140,000 people die from excessive alcohol use in the U.S. each year, only ~2,000 of those are alcohol poisoning.

[Snow_Falls]

Always seemed strange to me how we've decided alcohol is different somehow.

[lettergram]

> In private life, we probably do more "dumb things" than we used to. The number of people dying in car accidents or due to drug overdoses is absolutely staggering and is a fairly recent phenomenon. The gains from banning lawn darts and no longer using fire grenades are inconsequential in comparison.

I would consider drug overdoses dramatically different than car accidents. To the point, "dumb things" where you put deadly chemical in jar (fire extinguisher) is not the same as purposely injecting yourself or accidentally losing control of your vehicle.

For what it's worth, while drug fatalities are increasing (arguably there was an intentional act to start drugs, granted addition is less so):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_drug_overdose_de...

Vehicle fatalities are actually going down per year (and have been, on average, since the inception of the car)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

> But that aside, a lot of the gains in life expectancy have to do with very basic things - like flush toilets, along with generally improved standards of living.

I agree with you there, lots of minor things like vitamins, clean water, improved environmental controls, etc add up dramatically

[pksebben]

So like, here's the thing with the overdose crisis - it is in fact just like the dangerous chemicals being put in a jar. It's actually specifically that.

The recent spike in drug overdoses has nearly nothing to do with people going out and making bad decisions (at least, not more than they've made over the last 50 years), but the fact that doctors and pharma companies, who ought to know better, keep putting fentanyl out into the world and making it as accessible as any other schedule 1 controlled substance. You know, like weed is a schedule 1 controlled substance (1).

According to NIDA (who are the don't-do-drugs-mmkay folks, responsible for gems like the egg ad and DARE), the lion's share of the spike in drug-related fatalities is due to instances where the drugs taken were "in combination with synthetic opioids other than methadone" (2). That's fentanyl, folks. As cheap and easy to get as it is lethal, and here we are putting it in hospitals because anesthesiologists think it's just the bee's knees.

So like, we're putting little microscopic landmines out there AND creating the circumstances for an unregulated black market that benefits from mixing said landmines into people's cocaine, which ostensibly they want because they have a really great business pitch they just gotta get out at 3am at the club (rather than a crippling addiction that's leading them to OD). IMHO, kinda similar to the fire grenades. No way bad shit ain't gonna happen and it's on us if we're surprised.

1 - https://www.dea.gov/drug-information/drug-scheduling

2 - https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...

[jayd16]

Drug use is a modern thing? Opium, tobacco and alcohol are quite old.

[ponector]

Drug use is not a modern thing. Drug overdose is. It is much harder to overdose while smoking opium than swallowing pills or receiving a fentanyl injection.