Social drug epidemic Social Sciences Essay Research

Social Drug Epidemic
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Social Drug Epidemic
The American public has experienced major epidemics over its history although only a few of them whose scale of the attack on the people has been predicated upon specific contributions of their government and media interchangeably. The opioid epidemic appears to have the longest prevalence in the country that extends for over two decades today. The country’s population has become highly addicted to opioid pain relievers, which was the opposite of the initial reassurances from the pharmaceutical companies in the late 1990s. In their extremity, opioid overdoses have accounted for significant deaths. In 2016 alone, the country experienced 42,000 deaths from opioid overdoses, which rose to 47,600 deaths the following year (United States Department of Health and Human Services, 2019; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019). The consequences extend to newborns who incur the wrath of a withdrawal syndrome that arises from the use of opioids and misuse during pregnancy.
One certain thing is that the media-fueled the growth in opioid deaths considering that the average mortality per million people was at 0.81 in 1999 and shot to 1.90 in 2005. In the same period, there were approximately 31,651,000 related articles with 24,272 of them mentioning prescription opioids (Dasgupta, Mandl, & Brownstein, 2009). In this regard, when people realized the underlying problem concerning opioids, they resulted in the media for information. Unfortunately, the messages flowing from this end had “a substantial pattern of racial stereotypes and ‘media myths’ that both perpetuated false stigmas and heightened public fear” (Dunne, 2017, p. 28). There was a sense of backlash considering that even the whites who initially, were less associated with drugs were part of the victims in this new-found addiction (Netherland & Hansen, 2016). The same news outlets argued that treatment options were better compared to criminal consequences probably because the whites were involved. An example of the consequences of this position is apparent in New Hampshire where the judicial system opted for a supervised drug court program allowing “addicts facing jail time to receive treatment options and a job contract instead” (Dunne, 2017, p. 32). Governments were compelled to act this way because of the immense pressure that arose from the media and in possible hindsight, because of the number of white victims considering that drugs were closely linked to blacks and other ethnic minorities (Baehr, Pena, & Hu, 2015). Another manner to perceive the problem at hand would be to analyze th...