Leonardo Garcia ENGL1010

Opioid Crisis

Work, work is a very important activity that everyone does to survive in the modern

world. Nowadays, it is easy to find work for people that have no skills and it pays enough for a

living, and many others search for education so work will be better paid in the future. And how it

easy is to get it, it is easy to lose it; for example, you can apply to many jobs and just one of them

would call you or none based on your experience, and it is really easy to lose it if you re not

responsible enough, you can say that you want to work and then they fire you, you can go late to

work many times and they fire you. There are many factors that lead to job loss and one that

sticks with the person even after losing a job are the drugs. One of the leading causes of job loss

is drug abuse, specifically opioids. It is very easy to be prescribed opioids in the US that many

people have died because of opioid overdose. We should stop being prescribed with opioids after

all, it does not just damage your health, but can damage your relationships and activities such as

work that is necessary for a living. So we could be able to change our prescriptions if we ever get

prescribed with opioids, because in the long term it is not going to do any good to our health

more than ruining another life by addiction.

Olga Khazan wrote an article about the relationship between job loss and drug abuse,

she shows that the high rates of unemployment might have been contributing to the high rates of

drug addiction. This information might be old, but because the ease of getting substances in

cities and because doctors still prescribe opioids to patients in need, it makes the crisis still

relevant because doctors will continue what they are used to doing that is prescribing opioids to

people. “In 2013, Kentucky ,Rhode Island, and Nevada had some of the highest rates of death

from opioid overdoses, and they also had some of the country’s highest unemployment rates. A

series of studies suggests that this joblessness might have been—at least part—contributing to
the high rates of drug addiction.” In this paragraph from Khazan article, she describes the cities

that were the most affected by opioid overdoses in 2013, and in contrast with that the rates of job

loss of those cities increased that same year. Job loss could lead to drug use, and drug use can

lead to job loss. Either way you see it, it makes no difference in the results at the end.

But this is not everything that is happening now about drugs overdose, for example,

there is a restaurant called DV8 Kitchen. A couple from Kentucky realized that they have an

unusual power to help addicted people recover, they created this restaurant to hire, train and

encourage them. This type of work environment helps addicted people as Perez said to the article

of Priya Krishna “Still, the Perezes saw restaurants’ unusual potential for helping addicted

people recover. “There’scustomer service, culinary, baking, finances,” Mr. Perez said. “We can

teach you any of these businesses from scratch.” Cooking, in particular, he sees as “100 percent

therapy.” In making bread, for example, “there's something magic about kneading the dough

side by side with someone else, not making eye contact,” he said. “It is very tactile and

freeing.”” They see cooking as a therapy that can help people struggling with addiction and here

in the same article, one of the employees that she really like to cook for the guests that came in to

the restaurant, “Working the grill, she said, “is a huge coping skill for me.” Making burgers,

“adding the spices, the egg on top, making the homemade Dijonnaise,” and then seeing

customers’ reaction when they take a bite, brings “a sense of accomplishment,” she said.” This

means a lot in the crisis that we have with drug addiction, specifically with opioids because they

are the easiest drug to get because the prescriptions that the doctors give to patients all the time.

Despite the fact that there are people taking the initiative to help recover addiction, the problem

starts and it is still there because where it comes from are from medical centers, especially the
doctors that prescribe patients with opioids to solve almost all of their pain problems, and this

will always be a problem.

In Utah, the opioid overdose crisis decreased from 2016 to 2017 because the state

intervention of the prescribing behavior as how Erin Alberty wrote in her article, “Prescription

opioids were behind the bulk of fatalities in 2017, killing 237 of the 360 Utahns who died from

either opioid painkillers or heroin. As a result, much of the state’s intervention has focused on

the prescribing behavior of doctors.” Some of the doctors in Utah are still prescribing opioids for

the patients but at least we got more state intervention so people will get less prescribed with

opioids over the years so the addiction problems will decrease in the near future. Decreasing the

use of opioids is very important to change the opioid crisis that we have in the US, that’s why the

state of Utah is distributing a new drug that blocks the effects of opioids, “The state also is

distributing and training medics to use naloxone, a drug that quickly blocks the effects of

opioids, said Ann Williamson, executive director of the state Department of Human Services.”

The new drug is basically a way to help people that are suffering from opioid addiction and to

quickly erase the effects.

Taking this kind of drugs from a young age could affect the future of the person, in the

article of Priya Krishna there is a paragraph about a employee that took medication from a young

age and that led him to mistakes in the future, “Dan Rison, 29, who greets customers and serves

dishes, among other tasks, said he first started taking pain medication when he was 14, after an

operation intended to correct a birth defect. Heeventually became an alcoholic, was arrested

and pleaded guilty to cashing a forged check, and went to jail.” This is proof of what drugs can

do even at a young age or being adults, it can be a disaster at any age and it can ruin a person’s

life.
 Although the opioid crisis is happening in the US, the improvement of decreasing the

deaths every year would rise because of the consciousness that people have about the crisis.

Basically, we can reduce the number of deaths and addictions by being conscious about what we

are taking, we can deny opioid medication that will lead to less rates of job loss and the

distribution of opioid as medication will reduce drastically because of the low demand of that

type of drugs, of course if we take consciousness about the crisis because it is our hands the

control of our life.