If there is one thing that every country goes through, it’s an epidemic. Depending on where a country has located the type of epidemic will vary of course. You are more likely to find a nation in Africa suffering from a hunger epidemic while one in Europe struggles with a nuclear bombing death epidemic. The causes of these disasters may be natural or human-made, and the ways for dealing with them may be different, but if one thing is clear, it’s that epidemics have large scale and consequential loss in common. Therefore, they can be dealt with in the same way.
The US opioid epidemic has been around for a long time, but people recognized it as a threat to the country only around 2014 when the death toll became outrageous. As the US struggles to come back from its opiate disaster, the other world nations should not just sit back and watch. They should be taking notes from this superpower’s way of dealing with the epidemic because well, they made those notes in future.
#1 Never let it get that bad
The US did not start ridding the streets of opioid abuse until about a decade into the epidemic. People had already died in the millions from opiate overdose and other related causes before the cleansing began. By then, the US had to sink millions into covering treatment programs for users so that they would quit and the number of deaths would reduce. In fact, US is still using millions to deal with the opioid mess. Just earlier this week one of its states announced that it would be getting close to thirty million dollars in federal funding to deal with the opioid epidemic!
That’s the first lesson to other countries. If you have a problem now, deal with it. Do not let it get to the point where you will have to waste countless resources in combating the problem. That statement about procrastination and thieving is quite real when it comes to epidemics.
#2 Make sure it’s about the greater good
In the early ‘90s, pharmaceutical companies in the US capitalized on the ‘deal with chronic pain now’ hype of the time to flood the market with their opioid ‘remedies.’ The government gave the thumbs up even when it became evident that most opiate users were abusing the drugs. The abuse developed gradually into addiction and more recently into the full-blown epidemic. Why? Because no one had regulated these Big Pharma firms when they moved from recommending the drugs for medical purposes to selling it indiscriminately.
Nations with legal drugs should pay attention to this. Where does the boundary between pharmaceutical companies’ ‘greater good’ concept and ‘so long as it sells’ lie? Does the government have policies in place to prevent the commercialization that makes drug manufacturing firms oblivious to the human cost of selling the wrong drugs? If they don’t, they should get some.
#3 If you can’t beat them…
One of the reasons that made it so difficult for the US to deal with the misuse of opiates once and for all was the controversy surrounding them. On the one hand, they brought death, they were addictive and certainly harmful, so many people wanted them off the streets. On the other hand, the country had to look at the reason that it had promoted the drugs in the first place. Opioids were supposed to help those in severe pain manage their aches. The government couldn’t just ban all opioids. Where would that leave those who were legally and correctly using the drug for medical purposes? Since the government could not abolish the drugs, it did the next best thing. It used opiates to fight the opiate epidemic. Naloxone is an opioid that reduces the number of deaths after opioid overdoses, so it was distributed to state officials and emergency responders as a just-in-case measure. US scientists also took to their labs to manufacture opioids that could do all the pain-relieving work but packed none of the addictive highs.
This if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them approach to fighting the opiate epidemic can be used in other types of outbreaks. Sending agents in to dismantle terrorist groups and developing medicinal marijuana are just a few examples. The approach works when you have found the right applications for it.
#4 Legislation is the way to go
What is the number one reason that people from companies? That’s right, to make money. Self-satisfaction and making a difference are usually close runners, but they do not quite cut it. So, if individuals start firms to make money, it goes to reason that one of their biggest fears would be to lose money. By putting economic restrictions on potentially dangerous drugs, a country could reduce its risk of suffering an epidemic like the US’s opioid one. If that doesn’t work, making laws that favor truly wronged parties against the wrongful companies could discourage epidemics. Florida State in the US is currently setting the pace for this concept with its state of emergency for opioids and settlements against opioid firms.
An example of how else legislation helps is that it gives legal means for the government to get money to deal with a national epidemic.
Now, the legislation seems to work well and good for drugs, but can it be incorporated for use in any other model epidemic? Consider the following example.
A country can have a hunger epidemic for one of two reasons. Either there is no food available in the country or the traders in that country are playing a hoarding game to drive up the food prices. In some cases, it could be both. Should such a country put measures in place to detect this illegal hoarding and to prosecute anybody who practices it, then it can reduce the practice if only by a small fraction. Less ‘strategic storage’ would release some food into the markets thereby alleviating a little of the hunger pandemic in question. This is only one other example of how legislation could be used to deal with epidemics. Legislation worked in the US, and with some work, it could work for another country.
As nations deal with their various problems, they could take lessons from how the US is dealing with one of its greatest challenges.
