NEW YORK – During a recent press conference, President Donald Trump declared the country’s opioid crisis a “national emergency” and promised to spend a lot of “time, a lot of effort, and a lot of money” on the problem.
The United States has an estimated 2.6 million opioid addicts and drug overdoses (of all types) kill more people than car crashes and gun homicides combined; over 140 people a day and over 52,000 people died of overdoses in 2015—and on pace for 60,000 this year.
By comparison, 58,000 American troops died during the entire 10 years of the Vietnam War.
There are also more pain meds flooding medicine cabinets across the country. According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), in 1990 there were 75 million opiate pain med prescriptions written in the United States. By 2010, that number had risen to a whopping 210 million prescriptions—an almost three-fold increase.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, Executive Director of the Dunes in East Hampton, NY, a former Clinical Professor at Stony Brook Medicine, and a recovering opiate addict, spoke with The National Herald about the opioid crisis, the solution, and the Greek community.
He responded to TNH’s request for a comment from Greece where he was speaking on tech addiction at a University in Athens that was attended by several fellow addiction specialists.
He said, “As far as the Greek community… I can now say with certainly that addiction–and opiate addiction–is exploding not only in Greece, but also in the Greek-American community back in New York, where I work.”
“In Greece, high-unemployment, economic instability, and proximity to known heroin trafficking routes (Turkey, Afghanistan, Russia) have all contributed to the opioid problem. In New York, you have culturally displaced Greek immigrants, economic uncertainty, over-worked, over-stressed, and under-rested, notoriously, hard-working Greek-American immigrants seeking some relief from their daily work and lives. Greek teens and Millennials who have the same malaise and ‘failure to launch’ dynamics of many of their American counterparts have all contributed to their increased opioid addiction,” Dr. Kardaras told TNH.
When asked about a solution to the problem, he said, “I believe that we have to re-examine our view of addiction and, by extension, how we treat it and all of the misguided notions of the ‘war on drugs.’ As we are discovering more and more, addiction is less about the substances and more about a person’s need for the substances. Thus the opioid epidemic is less about opiates and more a byproduct of certain very complex social, cultural, biological, and economic factors that make a person vulnerable to the addictive escape of pain pills. Unless we address those underlying causal factors, we will never make a meaningful dent to the opiate crisis because we will have, effectively, been looking at the telescope through the wrong end.”
Dr. Kardaras is a highly-regarded addiction expert and the Executive Director of the Dunes- one of the world’s top rehab facilities. He was previously featured in TNH for his book Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids-and How to Break the Trance which is available online and in bookstores.
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