The present occasion. It's an oddly used word. You wouldn't say something like "On nonce, the engine didn't work." A better usage would be in place of "currently" or "now": "The engine didn't work for the nonce." You know what? This is confuddling. Let's just forget this entirely.
AnimalsDogsSnowGrand entrancesExcavationNo diamonds here, sorry
On The Dailies, we don't like going serious and "important" unless there's good reason. Our goal is to appreciate the beauty and creativity in the world. From time to time, though, we find a well-written article about an important topic and post it. Today is one of those times.
Over at First Things, Christopher Caldwell writes well about the opioid addiction crisis in America. It's a sobering landscape of many heartbreaking stories:
There have always been drug addicts in need of help, but the scale of the present wave of heroin and opioid abuse is unprecedented. Fifty-two thousand Americans died of overdoses in 2015—about four times as many as died from gun homicides and half again as many as died in car accidents. Pawtucket is a small place, and yet 5,400 addicts are members at Anchor. Six hundred visit every day. Rhode Island is a small place, too. It has just over a million people. One Brown University epidemiologist estimates that 20,000 of them are opioid addicts—2 percent of the population.
Salisbury, Massachusetts (pop. 8,000), was founded in 1638, and the opium crisis is the worst thing that has ever happened to it. The town lost one young person in the decade-long Vietnam War. It has lost fifteen to heroin in the last two years. Last summer, Huntington, West Virginia (pop. 49,000), saw twenty-eight overdoses in four hours. Episodes like these played a role in the decline in U.S. life expectancy in 2015. The death toll far eclipses those of all previous drug crises.
Caldwell isn't graphic but he pulls no punches, examining how society as a whole has enabled addiction. The cure, he suggests, is difficult and multipronged:
Medical treatment plays an obvious role in addressing the heroin epidemic, especially in the efforts to save those who have overdosed or helping addicts manage their addictions. But as an overall approach, it partakes of some of the same fallacies as its supposed opposite, “heartless” incarceration. Both leave out the addict and his drama. Medicalizing the heroin crisis may not stigmatize him, but it belittles him. Moral condemnation is an incomplete response to the addict. But it has its place, because it does the addict the compliment of assuming he has a conscience, a set of thought processes. Those thought processes are what led him into his artificial hell. They are his best shot at finding a way out.
You can read the article at First Things.
JournalismFirst ThingsChristopher CaldwellOpioidsAddictionThis American Carnage