Do you believe racism exists and is a problem in the US medical system?

Why do your posts usually have to do with your individual experiences which you then try to translate into a reality for the rest of the world

I am not the first poster to mention this

The issue with not doing any drugs is that those people are generally super close minded. If some selfishness is the price you have to pay for opening your mind some it's going to be worth it.

Because I am not selfish in the least and like to help others and try to make the world a better place.

By advocating that all sentient life end?

Cocaine is a far more dangerous substance than alcohol. Cocaine kills you much more quickly and easily. I'm not sure why you'd even think otherwise.

(depends on quantities)

Obviously. But I guess you could say that comparing any two substances, yet we can still make comparisons.

Takes a bunch of coke to have dangerous issues

Takes two shots to become an incredibly dangerous driver

That's a pretty unscientific way of looking at this. Let's try to look at some numbers from th US.
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/sites/default/...
https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/...

From these sources, alcohol is used by 62.3% of the population and is responsible for 140,557 deaths per year. Cocaine is used by 2% of the population and is responsible for 24,000 deaths. So alcohol is used by more than 31x as many people but leads to only less than 6x as many deaths.

What days supports your opinion?

actually from your data it would be more than double that, because the 24k deaths from cocaine in your data are overdose only, the 140k alcohol deaths are 60k overdoses, rest chronic. And cocaine can cause chronic loss of life expectancy as well.

But i think the 24k overdoses deaths are overwhelmingly from crack, as it's really hard to overdose by snorting.

Afaik many/most of the cocaine overdose deaths are because of fentanyl tainting actually

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/not-yeste...

This is a weird pair of responses to the data showing that pain medication is provided less frequently and in lower doses to black people. Instead of acknowledging that this might indeed be a data point where doctors are doing a worse job of treating people (reducing pain is part of medicine!) you two are handwaving that actually this is a good thing. Weird.

Cocaine causes those deaths or they die from opioid overdoses?

I’m talking about cocaine. And if the govt supplies it, it will just be cocaine and we won’t have any concern for opioid overdoses

“Cocaine-involved overdose death rates in the United States decreased from 2004 to 2012 but began increasing again in 2012. Non-Hispanic Black people experienced the highest death rate for overdoses involving cocaine in 2019.2 From 2020 to 2021, cocaine overdose death rates increased by nearly 22%, with more than 24,000 Americans dying in 2021 from an overdose involving cocaine.”

We aren’t talking about cocaine involved overdoses

We are talking about overdoses from cocaine.

Please note the difference and ask if you have any questions

Odd that you'd be so condescending when you've yet to provide any data supporting your opinion. Why don't you search for some numbers and see where this leads?

Go ahead. I already looked a bunch and everything was cocaine involved with an asterisk that the overdoes are most often from opiates being mixed into the cocaine.

Not sure if you read my posts but the data above supports my position.

Please list cocaine only overdoses, not cocaine involved ones

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databr...
This says that in 2021, 78.6% of overdose deaths involving cocaine also involved opioids. If we eliminate all those from the 24,000, we are left with 5,136. That puts alcohol at 27x more deaths. So, even at the numbers most generous for you (looking at all alcohol related deaths even if something else was involved, and looking only at deaths from cocaine that were by overdose and not involving an opioid), alcohol still comes up safer. It's okay to admit that your made up opinion is incorrect.

What number are you using for alcohol related deaths?

140k alcohol related deaths versus 5k?

Seems like alcohol is much more dangerous.

You don't think the amount of people using alcohol versus cocaine each year is relevant to making sense of those numbers? Absolute numbers are misleading; rates give us real information.

Do you realize painkillers are obscenely over prescribed in general in the USA?

Death isn't the only way to ruin lives.

My dad died of cancer in 2008 and my mom remarried to a cranky old man who turns into the shittiest of human beings after he gets a few Long Island Ice Teas into his system. He made her cry at Christmas once because he was 3 or 4 deep; I called him out on being an *******, demanded that he apologize, and he didn't speak to me for years afterward. Still doesn't, really.

How many other households are destroyed or left without a leader because someone has an alcohol problem? How many auto accidents don't end in death but still have permanent life-altering consequences?

The NIH says more than 10% of people age 12 an older have experienced Alcohol Use Disorder in the last year.

That's why I always think it's ridiculous to use alcohol as an example of successfully regulating drugs, and using it as a template for the legalization of everything else. Claiming drug enforcement is racist and advocating for more lenient treatment of abusers is missing the point entirely. That point being: drugs are bad, m'kay?

I don’t know if drugs are bad. But I do know alcohol is worse than cocaine for life EV for most people.

Both things can be true at the same time. The medical system can have a racist bias in not believing the pain and suffering of black people and taking inadequate steps to reduce that pain AND it can be that opiate prescriptions (particularly in the passed, there has been a lot of change on this file) were overprescribed causing addiction problems.

It's impossible to detect what race commits more crime, yet it's easy to detect what race smokes more weed and does more cocaine?

This isn't even a right/wrong issue. It's an issue of you having the inability to form a coherent argument.

I'm not ever sure you're a real person. It's like you're a bot programmed to argue and make zero sense.

So maybe they are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons? I would still rather have the treatment which is less likely to make me become an addict.

I didn't just hand wave anything away. I said no one is dying from pain, but lots of people are dying from pain killers. IMO opiates should never be given for chronic pain and only used very sparingly for transient pain, with no more than a few pills ever given for use while not under medical supervision. Patients treated in that manner are the ones getting the best health care, not the ones given bottles full of addictive drugs each month.

You are falling into the same trap as Pointless. Of course there are some people that get addicted to narcotic painkillers, but you are making a pretty baseless assumption that anybody that takes more than a few pills will become an addict. What percentage of people that take painkillers get addicted? If it is 100%, then clearly they should never be prescribed. If it is 0%, then there is little drawback to prescribing painkillers en masse. The number is somewhere in between, which is why this gets more complicated than "nobody should take more than a few pills."

The thought that because people supposedly don't die from pain, therefore it is just fine to allow somebody to live with pain rather than prescribe a medication that would alleviate that pain, is a bizarre take for many reasons.

I see you are unfamiliar with PointlessWord's body of work. Read more of his threads and you will see that your last sentence is pretty close to the truth. This is my personal favorite from the PW collection: Screenwriting teacher says it’s ok to us...