Today in @ScienceMagazine my colleagues and I address the mystery of why opioid overdoses in the US and Canada suddenly began dropping dramatically. We assemble traditional and novel evidence to point to an illicit drug supply disruption, probably in China. 1/8 Any given locality might experience a drop because say, the police took down a big drug gang, EMS got a new ambulance crew, a methadone clinic opened. But why did overdoses drop suddenly across two nations *even in places that didn’t do these things*? 2/8

People often refer to how the criminal justice system treats “Black and Brown people”, but my latest piece @washingtonpost shows how Hispanics and whites are now treated similarly and both are comparably distant from Blacks. A thread on surprising data. 1
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… This is the newest Bureau of Justice Statistics data on who is on parole, probation, in jail or in prison. Whites and Hispanics are near identical and both are about 1/3 African-American rate. 2

I have a piece up at @mattyglesias’s site Slow Boring on how we will lose the significant progress we have made in reducing incarceration and advancing the well-being of Black Americans if we don’t squelch the rise in violent crime. 1/6
slowboring.com/p/to-reduce-ma… The good news (see reports from @CouncilCJ) is that incarceration has been falling for over a decade and that this fall has been fastest among Black Americans. But the rise in violence can take all that away, through two routes. counciloncj.org/racial-dispari… 2/6

A change in academia that still shocks me is how comfortable some people have become openly discussing the putative value of withholding some accurate study findings in light of imagined political consequences. Once you go down this road, there is no route back to public trust. Many people have asked for examples, it's hard to give them without breaking people's privacy, but here are the sorts of things that bother me (all disguised).

Reviewer of a paper says "This epidemiological study shows a cluster of deaths due to a new drug. It's a good study but

Later this year, many liberal democracies will face a massive cultural, political and health challenge: Everyone who wants a vaccine will have had one (willingness below, US is about 56%) but it won’t be enough to reach population herd immunity. What then? THREAD 1/9 At this point, EVERYONE will want the economy/society opened because they think they’re safe, either because they’re vaccinated against COVID or because they think it’s a myth or they’ve been against lockdown all along. So everything opens way up and COVID-19 or one of its 2/9

The New York Times upheaval may indicate that US newspapers are becoming more British. Most UK newspapers are unapologetically partisan. It’s always been a way they compete for readers. NYT might turn into something like The Guardian, a national left-wing UK newspaper. 1/8 In most UK newspapers, the classically liberal goal of airing all views isn’t the orienting vision. Commentary has an explicit, unidirectional, political tilt. For the NYT, this would require replacing their centrist & conservative columnists/guest writers with left wing ones 2/8

I attended Michigan State University when it had an annual, increasingly famous, increasingly violent block party called Cedar Fest. One year, when the police cordoned off the apartment complex where it was held and checked IDs 1
lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/201… It turned out that many of the would-be revelers didn't live in the complex, indeed many of them didn't live in the city or state. This was a non-political event -- a party -- but once it got a reputation for violence it still drew outsiders 2

Most of my great public health colleagues are greatly over-estimating the likelihood that the U.S. can mount a national test, trace, and isolate program as have countries like Germany and South Korea. My friends are mistaking a political-cultural challenge for a technical one 1/9 Public health professionals are working out the technical side brilliantly. How many tests? What type? Who makes and processes them? How many health workers are needed for tracing? But solving these technical problems means nothing without widespread political consent 2/9