Ben Westhoff: prediction

Transcript context

…But what’s the right way to think about the equilibrium? Will it just be 17 percent of us are drug addicts, and some percent of those people die, and it will be that way forever? Or what social forces will restore, we hope, a better equilibrium? I don’t think it will be that way forever because I think people are starting to think about the problem in the right way, finally. We’ve always been so focused on the supply side for all these years, and that’s right now, too. My book is about China and how China is feeding the problem. But now that people in power know people who are dying, themselves, they’ve started to think that drug addiction and whatnot is a disease. We’re trying to think about how to educate people, how to give them treatment, how to do harm reduction, which is basically admitting that people are always going to use drugs, and finding more safe ways for them to do it. So even if the abuse rate, even if the number of people trying these drugs for the first time stays the same, I think that we can reduce the casualties. True or false, the opioid crisis is driven primarily by restrictions on the legal access to opioids?…

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