Source here
West Virginia, unlike most other states, has a program that
provides burial assistance for poor families. The total assistance averages $1,250
per burial. For the past two years, the allotted annual budget of roughly two
million dollars has been exhausted in March.
The state’s Department of Health and Human Resources
spokesperson didn’t comment or speculate as to the cause of the deficit, but
West Virginian funeral home directors have no quarrels with blaming the growing
problem on drug overdoses. The same people would also tell you that, contrasting with other low-income deaths, nearly all
of these drug overdose incidents rely upon the burial assistance program. “In
2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, West
Virginia's drug overdose death rate stood at 41.5 cases per 100,000 residents,
the highest rate in the country and nearly three times the national average. In
1999, the state's overdose fatality rate was below average.”
The cause of this exponential increase? Between 2007 and
2012, the same years that the drug overdose statistics began their
uncontrollable climb, drug wholesalers trafficked 780 million doses of
hydrocodone and oxycodone to West Virginia. That amount is enough to give every
man, woman, and child in West Virginia 433 pain pills. The Charleston Gazette-Mail
investigation that provided those statistics also claimed that those pills took
1,700 lives during that period of time.
So, it’s easy to see that there are plenty of bioethical
concerns intertwined in this story. The most glaringly obvious ethical concern
would be the shipment of 780 million doses of opiate pain-killers to a single
state. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the statement of “those specific
drugs killed X amount of people,” but I’m not ready to write it off as
coincidence, either.
It’s a little scary to think that various companies involved
in the process of producing and transporting these pharmaceuticals may have
sniffed out an opportunity for profit and completely ignored the ethical
ramifications of their actions. It also makes one wonder why these enormous
shipments of potentially harmful drugs can be concentrated and transferred
unnoticed (at least until years later and after the deaths of thousands).
Whether the drugs were shipped to a storage facility with no
malicious intent or to street vendors to distribute and make an unethical
profit, there’s a level of accountability that has yet to be attained and is
necessary to avoid tragedies like this.
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