|
Backward and Forward
January 7, 2022
|
|
|
|
This week was a return to life for HERE & THERE after a month off to press listeners to gift friends with interesting books, and to re-serve some excellent programs from the past year.
|
|
 The not-yet-ending pandemic made America so sick and frightened, it lost track of the other great health catastrophe attacking the nation: the epidemic of fatal drug overdoses. Over the past 20 years, overdoses have been killing drug-takers in numbers never seen before. Over a year that started April 1, 2020, more than 100,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, a round number of historic proportions.
One reporter saw what was happening from the beginning and put it before the public in detail and at historic scale. Sam Quinones has owned the American addiction story since he published Dreamland in 2015. That book tracked the creation and cultivation of a new market serving a new entitlement for those who could pay for it, the Right to Relief.
Arthur Sackler started marketing Relief from anxiety through tranquilizers like Librium and Valium. It was his descendants at Perdue Pharma who hyper-marketed OxyContin for Relief from pain, despite evidence the opioid was dangerously addictive. The latter-day Sacklers pocketed billions from selling relief and addiction.
But by the time Quinones was writing Dreamland, that was old news. What was just happening then was a shift in the Relief market, as hundreds of thousands of people who were originally hooked on over-prescribed Oxycontin found a cheaper, easier alternative. Heroin from Nayarit, Mexico swept across America, marketed and delivered like pies from your local pizzeria.
Medical relief from pain had become street-drug relief from anything that was bothering you. Reading Dreamland, you could watch addiction grow as the Relief entitlement reached new customers in new places.
But Quinones stayed with the story, watched history unfold, watched heroin displace prescription opioids and then watched fentanyl take over the street-drug markets from heroin and cocaine like a parasite consuming its hosts. In his new book, The Least of Us, Quinones covers not just the changes at the supply end of the addiction trail, but the normalization of demand on social media.
More new buyers with more and easier access to satisfy that entitlement for Relief.
The downside to Oxycontin's relief is addiction. The same for heroin. Easy to get; easy to use, but easy to get hooked. That's all true for today's king of chemical relief, when it comes to fentanyl, all those "easy's" keep getting easier, especially how easily Fentanyl can control you, and kill you.
Starting the new year with Sam Quinones, as we did on Monday's HERE & THERE, was an honor. Find the show here.
And you might want to check out our 2016 conversation about Dreamland. Find that show here. |
|
 On Tuesday, we had the perfect "follow." Reporter Matthew Reisen had just finished a well-reported three-part series for the Albuquerque Journal on how fentanyl now rules the drug markets of New Mexico. The morgues are having a hard time keeping up, but drug rehabilitation centers are as much as a year behind. That's how long the wait for a bed is at one of Albuquerque's few addiction reclamation facilities. What Sam said, Reisen found close to home. You can find the show here.
|
|
 Perennially among the lowest-rated American institutions in Gallup's national polls is the Congress. There are a lot of good reasons why, and Winslow Wheeler knows most of them. Win spent 31 years as a top staffer on Capitol Hill, then watchdogged Congress for 13 years at POGO — the Project On Government Oversight. When they vote on many of the most important bills passed each session, few Senators or Representatives have any idea what they are making into law. The system, built to empower and convenience the Congressional leadership, keeps most members playing "Blind Man's Bluff." The context was the late-December-passed National Defense Authorization Act when Wheeler and I talked for Wednesday's HERE & THERE. You can find the show here.
|
|
 Thursday's program was about loss — irredeemable loss — the eradication of parts of our planet. Some are gone forever, a few can be partially re-claimed, but the real focus of guest Marina Psaros' Atlas of Disappearing Places is on endangered environments that can still be saved, and how that might be done.
You can find the show here.
|
|
|
NEXT WEEK: THE PANDEMIC HITS RURAL NEW MEXICO; A WAY TO COOL PLANET EARTH; NO WAY TO HAVE AN ELECTION AND TRAFFICKING THE UNBORN (A SECOND LISTEN.)
|
|
As the Omicron Variant moves from East to West across the country, the New Mexico healthcare system is bracing for a new wave of infections. Our guest next Monday on HERE & THERE, emergency care physician Clayton Dalton, has been writing eloquently for The New Yorker about how his rural hospital has been over-stressed as its core of staff dwindles and options to send patients to better-equipped hospitals are reduced. Dr. Dalton admits, the fact that almost all his most serious cases are people who put him and his colleagues — as well as themselves — at risk by choosing to be unvaccinated makes everything harder.
The term geo-engineering may sound generic, but actually it refers specifically to the concept of deflecting some solar rays from Earth to slow global warming. Tuesday's guest environmental scientist Gernot Wagner looks at the positive and negative effects of putting this quite plausible theory into practice in his new book Geo-Engineering: The Gamble. The defects? The good geo-engineering does may not be good enough, and might distract from better ideas. Geo-engineering would certainly reduce New Mexico's 300-plus days of sparkling sunshine. And then there's the political question: Who would run the global-scaled program?
Logic says national unity must precede national elections, but Libyan journalist Mustafa Fetouri tells us on Wednesday, the vast majority of his countrymen want a chance to vote for a new president, even if the winning candidate may have little chance to govern effectively, much less unify a bitterly fragmented nation-state. 2021's civil war suggested Libya was split in two. Reality is much messier. BTW, one leading presidential candidate is the overthrown leader Muammar Gaddafi's son. Hear what the Biden Administration thinks about that.
On Thursday, we bring back a 2020 story of human trafficking in infants and even some children as yet unborn. Robert Anglen of the Arizona Republic originally told us back in 2020 about how one rising Phoenix-area politician was caught bringing women from the Marshall Islands to America to harvest and adopt-out their babies.
— dmarash
|
|
ATTENTION ART LOVERS:
We’re now on Instagram @imdavemarash
And find more great work by Amy Marash here. |
|
 Listen to Here & There Mondays through Thursdays at 4:07 MDT on KSFR FM 101.1 in Santa Fe or live-streamed on ksfr.org, or catch up with us on WMNB LP in North Adams, Massachusetts; KENW in Portales, New Mexico; KSVR in Mount Vernon, Washington; KCSB in Santa Barbara, California; KUPR in Placitas, New Mexico; WYAP in Clay County, West Virginia; KRZA in Alamosa, Colorado;KENE in Eagle Tail, New Mexico; KENG in Ruidoso, New Mexico; KENM in Tucumcari, New Mexico; KMTH in Maljamar, New Mexico; and KMXT, Kodiak Island, Alaska. |
|
Go to our website davemarash.com or subscribe to Here & There with Dave Marash on iTunes, Stitcher or Spotify.
And if you care to contribute to defray our expenses, just click here.
|
|
And look on our davemarash.com website to see what the radio and podcast can’t show you – the great editorial illustrations of Amy Marash. Come for the info, stay for the art. And if you know appropriate readers, know that the prestigious journal The Lancet: Oncology recommends Amy’s book Cancer Is So Funny to all sufferers from cancer and their caregivers and friends. |
|
|
If you like what we’re doing, please post this newsletter to your social media:
|
|
|
- FIND | FRIEND | FOLLOW -
|
|
|
|
