Alternet - Life expectancy in the US has declined for the second year in a row as the opioid crisis continues to ravage the nation. It is the first time in half a century that there have been two consecutive years of declining life expectancy.
Drug overdoses killed 63,600 Americans in 2016, an increase of 21% over the previous year, researchers at the National Center for Health Statistics found. Americans can now expect to live 78.6 years, a decrease of 0.1 years. The US last experienced two years’ decline in a row in 1963, during the height of the tobacco epidemic and amid a wave of flu.
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Deaths from despair--the same phenomenon that fueled Trump's victory, not that he'll do anything to stop it.
From Lost Horizon, 1937
Chang: Age is a limit we impose upon ourselves. You know, each time you Westerners celebrate your birthday, you build another fence around your minds.
Chang: It is very common here to live to a very ripe old age. Climate, diet - the mountain water you might say. But we like to believe it's the absence of struggle in the way we live. In your countries, on the other hand, how often do you hear the expression, "He worried himself to death," or "This thing or that killed him"?
Robert Conway: Oh, very often.
Chang: And very true. Your lives are, as a rule, shorter. Not so much by natural death, as by indirect suicide.
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