What Happened Today: June 16, 2022
European leaders at Zelensky’s behest; Free Gutentag!; The Future of American Overdoses
The Big Story
Dangling the promise of European Union membership during a visit with President Volodymyr Zelensky today, the leaders of France, Germany, and Italy expressed a new eagerness to sweeten a peace deal that would see the end of the conflict in Ukraine. Zelensky, meanwhile, has maintained an ambivalence about the possibility of a reliable treaty, instead asking his European counterparts for more heavy artillery even as the European Commission announced it will make an official decision about Ukraine’s admission into the union on Friday.
European leaders have given more support—rhetorically, at least—for Ukraine’s membership to the union just as the disruptions caused by the Russian invasion have become increasingly devastating for Europe. With a global food crisis now brewing because of grain stuck in Ukrainian ports, energy prices surging, and runaway inflation, life is getting very difficult across the continent. For now, Europe’s leaders are still walking a tightrope between applying gentle pressure for a potential treaty with Russia and providing Zelensky the heavy weapons he needs. Former Russian president and security council vice chairman Dmitri Medvedev described the trip as nothing but hot air, disparaging the leaders of France, Germany, and Italy as “European connoisseurs of frogs, liverwurst, and pasta.”
With the European leaders working the Ukrainian angle to ease their energy price woes, officials at the European Union were busy inking a new agreement this week with Israel and Egypt to send natural gas to the 27 nations of the bloc as they attempt to wean themselves off the 40% of their gas supply coming from Russia. Though short-term demand increases for gas in Egypt and Israel means there isn’t much to spare yet for gas customers in Europe, the deal could pave the way for more substantial infrastructure investments that could leverage the large natural gas fields in the two Middle Eastern countries into substantial sources of European energy as it decouples itself from Russian providers.
In the Back Pages: The Future of American Overdoses
The Rest
→ Free Gutentag! Tablet columnist Alex Gutentag has once again been suspended from Twitter, where she tweets as @galexybrane, for writing something that the platform’s information ministers, who work closely with the White House in a cooperative censorship effort, decided the public should not be allowed to see. A former Oakland public school teacher who resigned in protest over how shutdown policies were harming the mostly poor and minority students in her school district, Gutentag’s writing for Tablet distinguished her as the United States’ single sharpest observer of the costs of COVID-19 hysteria. Here’s some of Gutentag’s best work. Read it while you still can:
→ COVID-19 vaccines for children 5 and under are likely to be approved by the FDA in the coming days, with the agency’s Related Biological Products Advisory Committee unanimously voting on Wednesday to recommend approval for both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. They were also unanimous in “the emphasis on choice” that parents should have in deciding what is best for their children, said one doctor on the committee. The likelihood of a child getting very sick from the virus, according to another committee member, is comparable to that of being struck by lightning—a low risk that parents will weigh against the need to get three doses of the Pfizer vaccine for it to protect against the virus. (That’s three screaming trips to the pediatrician—a fair deal more than most parents can bear.) Florida, meanwhile, is the only state that hasn’t pre-ordered doses of the vaccine for those 5 and under and that advises those 5 to 17 years old not to get vaccinated. In a statement, Florida’s Department of Health said that it “has made it clear to the federal government that states do not need to be involved in the convoluted vaccine distribution process, especially when the federal government has a track record of developing inconsistent and unsustainable COVID-19 policies.”
→ The administration of Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. has routinely and egregiously failed to comply with information requests and record-keeping requirements, according to The Baltimore Banner. Olszewski told The Banner that he inherited a government “where transparency was too often an afterthought” and that “[his] administration has made it a top priority.” A review of the record suggests the exact opposite, and that Olszewski’s administration “erased data, missed deadlines, ignored requests, and redacted information already available in other public documents,” with whole columns of spreadsheets wiped clean—including columns indicating whether the administration was complying with public information laws. Such spotty—and potentially illegal—record keeping is not unique to Baltimore County, as offices all across Maryland have similarly dismal track records keeping their books and making information easily accessible to the public.
→ Crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who has already announced that he intends to spend a cool billion bucks on the 2024 elections, now appears to be dipping a toe into the world of media, hiring Avi Zenilman, a “recovering journalist” and fully licensed nurse who recently published a slate of articles in The New York Times about the COVID-19 pandemic, to join a growing team of journalists. Doing what, exactly? Unclear, but much of Bankman-Fried’s philanthropy has focused on pandemic prevention, including the $5 million he donated to ProPublica in early 2022 to boost its coverage of COVID-19. While his ultimate goals remain unknown, it’s clear that Bankman-Fried is following the latest trend among tech billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, who purchased The Washington Post, and Marc Benioff, who purchased Time magazine, that you haven’t really made it in this world until you own a legacy media company.
→ QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Europe is sucking LNG.”
Steve Hill, executive vice president at Shell, explaining why many developing countries are facing energy shortages. One such country is Pakistan, the fifth most populous country on the planet, which is now suffering through 12-hour planned blackouts during a summer heat wave while the country has shelled out $5 billion in the past 12 months—more than double what was spent the 12 months prior—to buy an entirely inadequate supply of liquified natural gas (LNG). LNG prices have increased by more than 1,000% in the past two years, first because of the pandemic and then because of the global energy shortage caused by sanctions against Russian oil. Pakistan had hoped to avoid such an energy crisis by making long-term energy contracts with Qatar and Italy; those countries have defaulted on their contracts with Pakistan, although they continue to fulfill contracts with other countries. Now Pakistan’s newly elected leader, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, has implemented a slate of serious energy cuts and redirected supplies to power plants—a zero-sum move that has left fertilizer manufacturers with inadequate supply, leading to worries about food shortages next year.
→ Following up on a little-covered attack in April of underwater internet cables thwarted by the Homeland Security Investigations division in Honolulu, Will Manidis, who founded a healthcare startup, explains in this Twitter thread why “our internet infrastructure is at incredible risk,” adding that the recent attempt to take out a key conduit of the Pacific telecommunications system should serve as a “reminder that our continued freedom rests on an increasingly vulnerable set of infrastructure that is only waiting to be attacked.”
→ Sri Lanka faces a “dire humanitarian crisis,” with 4 out of every 5 citizens in the country of 22 million people now skipping meals, according to the United Nations, as the island nation suffers through a devastating food and gas shortage that is only expected to get worse. The country’s economy collapsed over the course of the pandemic, largely because its tourism industry disappeared, falling from 5.6% of the country’s GDP in 2018 to 0.8% in 2020. The food crisis, meanwhile, was worsened by the government’s decision to ban chemical fertilizers last April without offering farmers adequate alternatives, leading to historically low crop yields.
→ With George Washington University’s leadership decision this week scrub its long-standing nickname, The Colonials, because of “division among the community about the moniker,” this is a good time to recall that, despite what you might have read elsewhere, the American colonies did not exist, colonial Williamsburg will soon be razed and replaced with a Soul Cycle studio and, for obvious reasons, American grammar guides will no longer use the root “colon” to describe the two-dot punctuation marks.
→ Reasonable minds prevailed in the tennis world this week when the director of the U.S. Open championship, set to begin at the end of August in New York, said Russian and Belarusian players will be allowed to compete. The athletes were granted approval to play because officials didn’t want to hold “the individual athletes accountable for the actions and decisions of their governments,” said Lew Sherr, the tournament director. The U.S. Open joins the French and Australian championships in allowing some of the best players in the world to compete in their marquee Grand Slam events, and stands in stark contrast to the British’s All England Club, which caved under pressure from top government officials to make examples of tennis players by barring them from Wimbledon, which will begin at the end of June.
→ Programming Note: The Scroll will be off tomorrow and return on Monday, June 20.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
The Future of American Overdoses
Imagine that it’s the middle of June 2028 and we’re deep into election season. The White House is on the line, and so is the balance of power in Congress. Unlike in June 2022, however, one of the most significant political narratives every candidate must address is what to do about the drug overdose crisis, which has been almost 30 years in the making. Yet between 1998 and 2028, nothing much has changed: National and state drug policy interventions remain uneven and piecemeal, broken by the same political gridlock that has made a mess of everything else in the country. Long-standing institutions meant to preserve and nurture American lives continue to struggle with their core competencies. The annual rate of lethal overdoses has reliably increased every year. Which means that by the end of December 2028, roughly 200,000 Americans will have died in one year from drugs.
That rate of increase is easy enough to figure out. Using CDC overdose data for 1999 through 2021, the total 1.04 million overdose deaths breaks down to an average annual increase of just over 9%. Even if you ignore the recent surge of the past two years, when lethal overdoses rose roughly 32% and 15% in 2020 and 2021 respectively, applying the 20-year growth trend of 9% would give us just shy of 200,000 dead in 2028, with the total death toll since 1999 topping out at about 2.1 million.
Stay on track, and by the following presidential election in 2032, 280,000 Americans will have died just that year of a drug overdose.
By the end of 2036, the first year of the next presidential term, nearly 400,000 Americans will have died in a single year from a drug overdose.
Those numbers seem impossible—that in about 15 years’ time, half a million Americans will have died in a single year from drug overdoses.
It must be safe to assume that we will have learned something substantial between now and then to prevent such a massive loss of life. Or, barring that, there just won’t be many people left to die from a lethal dose of drugs.
But over the past 20 years, when users tangled up in the drug overdose epidemic went from Vicodin and Percocet to OxyContin and now fentanyl, the overarching lesson seems to be that the drugs keep getting stronger, more people take them, and no one in a position of authority agrees on how to fix the problem—that it’s both a supply side issue, with more drugs now circulating in the streets than law enforcement can reasonably remove, and a ceaseless appetite on the demand side, with Americans unable to satiate their desire for obliterating substances.
And while teenagers and young adults make up a significant portion of those dead, the greatest increase in lethal overdoses over the past few years has occurred among adults ostensibly in the peak of their life—between 35 and 44 years old—for whom drug deaths jumped a dramatic 33% between 2019 and 2020. It’s that same cohort that also accounted for more than 42% of all emergency drug and alcohol related visits to U.S. hospitals last year.
In other words, the Americans who should be building families, businesses, and thriving in their communities are the ones most likely to drop out of society in pursuit of a high so potent that it kills them.
Which might beg the question, What’s wrong with Americans?
perhaps a good part of drug overdoses due to lack of medical insurance coverage for pain, undetermined illnesses, no doctors / nurses available, no medical insurance at all...? the clinton-obama attempts to provide some relief for USA poor, lower middle class, workers, failed. and overdose (self treatment) escalated....
What we are seeing is the tragic toll globalization has taken on the working class in this country. There is massive inequality in America, and no one is doing anything about it. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared there is little more than minimum wage jobs in retail and nursing homes for people without a college degree. At the same time, those with degrees leave college with a mountain of debt and few prospects. Because of Covid we spent billions on relief without paying for it, and now inflation is taking a huge bite out of people living on the edge. The Republicans keep cutting taxes and keeping Democrats from raising them. We needed to help people during Covid, but we can't help people or solve problems without paying for it. While the media prattles on about race and gender the poor (the real marginalized) are ignored. It is simple, there a lot of people who have lost hope and that leaves them wanting to obliterate reality with alcohol and drugs.