Young people death data...
This was a great lecture on Heroin using, Drugs: The Dark Side course materials.
In one section I introduced the England & Wales Death Data which clearly shows a rise in mortality in people between the ages of 40 and 70, which suggests people turning to illicit drugs as a form of pain management, as the NHS reduces Opioid prescriptions to avert the addiction crisis we see in the US.
Other deaths in this demographic will include Generation X; those born between the 1960s & 80s, who may have been using heroin over many years.
For example, in 2021, there were 362 heroin deaths of people between ages 50 and 69. In the same period however, there were just 12 heroin deaths of persons under 20.
If we compare this with MDMA deaths in the same year, there were also 12 deaths of persons under 20, (9 deaths of persons between 50 and 69), equating MDMA risks with heroin.
If we consider the totality of Under 20 deaths between 2018 and 2021, a total of 78 people under the age of 20, died from MDMA poisonings, yet only 45 persons in that age group died from heroin (32 from cocaine, 2 from Fentanyl, and 2 from Cannabis).
Heroin quite rightly gets the negative press it deserves, but MDMA does not. Many campaign groups see MDMA as the “right on” rave drug, which is safe for young people, and has even been endorsed by some “modern” police forces operating at outdoor festivals, yet it kills almost twice as many young people as does heroin.
At such festivals we have seen other “let’s take drugs safely” advocates testing drugs for their “safetyness”! These advocates are simply playing Russian Roulette with other people’s (kids’) lives, and will vanish when things go wrong.
There is no such thing as “consuming industrial chemicals safely”.
If you require support in this very complex subject area, please feel free to reach out (schools or corporate HR teams), then please get in touch.
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