On the High Seas
My son just graduated from high school and is headed to college in the Fall. We haven’t shopped for backpacks, binders, notebooks, dorm accessories, or pens and pencils. But like many parents, my wife and I have already ordered him a couple Narcan kits in case he or a classmate comes into contact with a heavy opioid dose. We’re hardly alone in buying this now readily available product and repeatedly giving our kids the “no pills or powders” talk. The opioid overdose problem is widespread in America, from sea to shining sea—including the seas. “Since the opioid crisis hit the United States in the late 1990s, no community has been spared. First with prescription painkillers, then with heroin after tighter prescription rules pushed people dependent on opioids to underground markets, and more recently with illicitly manufactured fentanyl and its many analogues, the epidemic has killed roughly 800,000 people by overdose since 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With fatalities averaging more than 80,000 a year for three years running, it is the nation’s leading cause of accidental death.” C.J. Chivers in the NYT Magazine (Gift Article): The Mayday Call: How One Death at Sea Transformed a Fishing Fleet. “On the water, pedigree and background checks mean little. Reputation is all. In this way, the vessels preserve a professional culture as old as human civilization and bring to shore immense amounts of healthful food, for which everyone is paid by the pound, not by the hour. Taken together, these circumstances pressure deckhands to work through fatigue, ailments and injuries. One means is via stimulants or painkillers, or both, making it no surprise that in the fentanyl era fishing crews suffer rates of fatal overdose up to five times that of the general population.”
+ The Boston Globe (Gift Article): “A 2023 study by NPR found that 11 of the 20 largest school districts in the country stocked naloxone. Additionally, 33 states have laws that allow schools to store naloxone, highlighting the widespread recognition of its importance in addressing the overdose crisis among adolescents. However, many adolescents remain unfamiliar with naloxone and its proper usage.”
+ Humans aren’t the only ones impacted by drugs on (and in) the water. “From brown trout becoming “addicted” to methamphetamine to European perch losing their fear of predators due to depression medication, scientists warn that modern pharmaceutical and illegal drug pollution is becoming a growing threat to wildlife.”
