Is it because Angus Deaton had received, that year, the Nobel Prize in economics for his previous work on the extraordinary enrichment of the West in the XIXe century (The great Escape, PUF, 2015)? Still, the article he published with his colleague at Princeton University, Anne Case, on December 8, 2015, in the prestigious scientific journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America will attract so much attention that it will generate – this is not so often for an academic publication – a political scandal, then a judicial scandal.
A dive into health statistics indeed allowed them to demonstrate that the death rate of white Americans “non-Hispanic” aged 45 to 54 had been rising steadily since 1999, unlike that of other categories of the population. The most massive cause – but not the only one – of this disturbing phenomenon was the massive prescription by the doctors of analgesics containing addictive substances – the opioids or opiates.
Reports and testimonies multiplied in the media, and legal complaints from individuals, municipalities and states began to rain against pharmaceutical companies suspected of knowingly promoting deadly term drugs. It is the biggest health scandal in American history.
Put on the spot for its laxity, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) turns around and begins to ban certain drugs, in June 2017. In May 2018, Congress hears the labs. In 2019, Purdue, maker of OxyContin, pays Oklahoma State $ 270 million (€ 225 million) to quash the lawsuits, but Johnson & Johnson is ordered to pay the same $ 572 million. State. The court dramas are far from over.
Released in 2020 in the United States, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. PUF, 2021, 412 pages, 25 euros) summarizes and extends the work that Angus Deaton and Anne Case have published.
Your book explains the causes of the sharp increase in the mortality of part of the American population from 1999, which you describe as an “epidemic of deaths of despair”, long before the current epidemic of Covid-19. What are the nature and extent of this phenomenon? Who are the victims?
We define deaths from suicide, alcoholic liver disease, and accidental drug overdoses as “deaths of despair”. Most of the increase in deaths occurred after the FDA cleared the use of OxyContin, and after it, other opiates began to be prescribed overwhelmingly as painkillers. At one time, so many opiates were prescribed that every adult American could have treated himself for a month.
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