WASHINGTON POST
A new study from Penn State University suggests a relationship between the opioid epidemic and support for Donald Trump.
The president-elect performed better than Mitt Romney in many places, but he fared best compared to the Republican nominee four years ago in the counties with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates.
Shannon M. Monnat, an assistant professor of rural sociology and demography, created a data set with numbers from 3,106 counties. She found this trend to be true nationally but especially so in two regions: In the industrial Midwest, which is how academics refer to the Rust Belt, Trump ran ahead of Romney by an average of 16.7 percent in the quarter of counties with the highest mortality, compared to 8.1 percent in the lowest quartile. In New England, Trump did worse than Romney by an average of 3.1 percent in the lowest mortality counties but better than the former Massachusetts governor by an average of 10 percent in the highest mortality counties.
-- Overdoses, alcoholism and suicide are known by experts collectively as “the diseases of despair.” People often (but not always) turn to pills, syringes, the bottle and other self-destructive behaviors when they lose hope, when they don’t have the means to live comfortably or when they don’t get the dignity that comes from work.
It is intuitive that the least economically distressed counties also tend to have the lowest mortality rates, and vice versa. In this way, alcoholism, overdoses and suicide are symptoms of the deeper social decay that was caused by deindustrialization. This decay led to the fears and anxieties which Trump so effectively capitalized on.
-- This really ought to be one of the biggest storylines that everyone takes away from 2016. One big reason that elites along the Acela Corridor were so caught off guard by Trump’s victory is that they’re so insulated from the stomach-churning scourge of addiction and cycle of brokenness. Washington has never been richer or further removed from the pain of everyday Americans, as Hillary Clinton called them in the video announcing her candidacy. Trump’s solutions may not actually help the “the forgotten man” that he talked so much about on the stump. In fact, his administration may very well push policies that ultimately only add to their pain. The tax cuts he wants will disproportionately benefit the most affluent people in the bluest states, for example. But the system has failed them. Trump promised to blow it up; Clinton represented more of the same.