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Dreamland author details how opioid crisis grew/10th District candidate Alan Howe

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What to look for on Smart Talk Wednesday, April 25, 2018:

More than 42,000 people died of opioid overdoses in 2016 — the last year statistics are available.  That’s five times more than in 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control.  The opioid crisis or epidemic was fueled by prescribed painkillers that often led to heroin addictions.  Even the most high-income idyllic neighborhoods have been touched by opioids.

Awarding winning journalist and author Sam Quinones detailed a seminal history of the opioid crisis in his 2015 book Dream Land: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.  The book is WITF’s Summer Read for 2018.

In the book, Quinones describes how a doctor in Boston wrote a letter in 1979 to the New England Journal of Health that said of 12,000 hospital patients he treated with opiates, only four became addicted.  Even though the one-paragraph letter didn’t say what dosage the patients got and for how long, that letter was cited for decades by the medical profession and a drug manufacturer that opioids weren’t addictive.

Quinones also writes about black tar heroin that flooded the United States from a small county in Mexico that helped hook thousands of white Americans in smaller cities and rural areas of the country.

Quinones appears on Wednesday’s Smart Talk

Quinones also will speak at the Pullo Center in York Monday, April 30th at 5:30pm and will feature a Keynote presentation by Quinones followed by a Local Leader Panel Discussion.  Learn more at the Pullo Center’s website.

Also, Smart Talk discusses issues with another candidate before the May 15th primary on Wednesday’s program.  Alan Howe is a Democrat, who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives in the 10th Congressional District.  The 10th District encompasses Dauphin County, northern York County and eastern Cumberland County.

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Alan Howe

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