Why Has Violent Crime Dropped?

  Many posts have discussed crime in the United States.

Mike Allen at Axios:

By the numbers: The U.S. violent-crime rate plunged 9.7% in 2025, the largest annual decline since FBI national estimates began 90 years ago.The murder rate fell 18.5% to 4.1 per 100,000 people, tying 1955 and 1956 for the lowest since national estimates began.
And the decline hasn't stopped: An Axios analysis shows violent crime in big cities fell again in the first half of 2026.

Criminologists describe a complicated picture of why crime is down. No one's sure, but several overlapping forces seem to be driving the drop: 

• Vice consumption cooled: Pandemic-era spikes in alcohol consumption, illicit drug use and firearm purchases — three factors linked to the 2020–2021 homicide surge — have receded.
• Return to routine: COVID lockdowns disrupted community guardrails and displaced young men and teens. Employment and social routines have since stabilized.
• Law enforcement tech boom: Police departments are using more AI tools, predictive analytics and platforms such as Palantir's Gotham to deploy resources and identify crime hotspots.

 Under-the-radar demographic and health trends are also quietly reshaping public safety:The proportion of young people in America is declining, shrinking the demographic most historically linked to street crime. In a fascinating medical twist, the explosion of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs (like Ozempic) has been clinically linked to decreased alcohol abuse and improved impulse control — two major factors in violent offenses.

Housing and Homelessness in LA

A number of posts have dealt with homelessness.  

Andrew Khouri and Doug Smith at LAT:

A 2025 poll from Politico and the UC Berkeley Citrin Center found 61% of California voters supported or somewhat agreed with arresting homeless individuals if they refused offers of shelter.

Benjamin Henwood, director of USC’s Center for Homelessness, Housing and Health Equity Research, said many in the public believe drug addiction and mental health problems to be the main causes of homelessness, because those issues are highly visible on city streets. But he said research consistently shows that while those issues play a role, the main driver is the high cost of housing.

After all, people struggle with addiction and mental health in lots of cities, but those places don’t have the high rates of homelessness seen in Los Angeles.

A recent study by the Benioff Homeless and Housing Initiative at UC San Francisco found that about 37% of homeless people were using illicit drugs regularly, and 25% said they had never used drugs. Just over 65% reported having regularly used at some point in their lives, and 27% had started after becoming homeless.

Disappearing Data

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute."   -- George Orwell, 1984

A number of posts have discussed presidential documents, official data, and government websites.

Shifra Dayak and Anna Kramer at NOTUS:

NOTUS verified dozens of instances of lapsed federal data to capture the range of information that is no longer being collected, has been paused or is now not available to the public. This is only a small sample of the data collection the Trump administration has made changes to:The Department of Agriculture terminated a report on household food security in September, claiming it was “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.” Feeding America said it relied on this survey to guide its programs.

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped releasing data on maternal and infant mortality in April 2025 after the administration placed all of the agency staff managing the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System on administrative leave. The data collection resumed in at least some states in July 2025, but recent data contains gaps.
• Trump directed the Justice Department last year to suspend a Biden-era database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement officers.
• The administration removed questions on gender identity from the National Crime Victimization Survey, the National Health Interview Survey and other surveys. Homeless shelters, mental health hotlines and substance use recovery programs all used this data for policymaking and planning.
• The Department of Homeland Security ended public access in October to its public safety and infrastructure dataset, called Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data.
• The National Center for Education Statistics missed a mandated deadline to release its annual report on the condition of the American education system, and the materials released were lacking in data compared to previous years.
• The Health and Human Services Department’s 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health omitted information about drug use based on race and ethnicity. HHS laid off the team that collected the data, though the agency is reportedly working with a contractor to resume its collection.
• The Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Education and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration no longer allow researchers to apply to access and study their data.
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics produces fewer calculations for its producer price index program and has cut down where it collects data from.

Some of these cuts were made without any public fanfare, like the administration’s decision to end DAWN. [Drug Abuse Warning Network]  In other cases, agencies slipped the news into routine announcements. And occasionally, like when the White House mandated that questions about gender identity be removed from federal surveys, the administration touted the deletions as quelling “gender ideology extremism.”

Pardoning a Drug Trafficker

Previous posts have discussed the president's pardon power.

Marc Caputo at Axios:

From a U.S. prison cell, Honduras' ex-president secured a likely pardon for drug trafficking thanks to a letter he penned praising President Trump — whom he called "Your Excellency" — and a persistent lobbying campaign by longtime Trump pal Roger Stone.

Why it matters: The surprise announcement of Juan Orlando Hernandez's looming pardon is a window into the unorthodox, norm-shattering way Trump grants clemency.

Driving the news: Trump announced Friday that he planned to pardon Hernandez ahead of Sunday's elections in Honduras, where the White House backed the right-wing National Party that Hernandez led as president from 2014-2022.National Party candidate Nasry "Tito" Asfura is narrowly leading a center-right candidate as votes are being counted in a three-way race, according to the BBC.

Zoom in: Shortly after Trump took office in January, Stone wrote three separate Substack posts calling for the pardon of Hernandez, who was indicted the day he left office in 2022 and extradited to the U.S. to face cocaine-trafficking and weapons charges.

Stone cast Hernandez as a victim of leftist "lawfare" in Honduras and in President Biden's administration.Stone told Axios that on Friday he reached out to Trump and reiterated those points. Stone claimed a pardon announcement would energize the National Party and called Trump's attention to Hernandez's four-page letter begging for clemency.

Hours later, at 4 p.m., Trump posted on Truth Social that he'd endorse Asfura. Less than 20 minutes later, he posted that he'd pardon Hernandez.

"It was a Biden setup," Trump told reporters Sunday about the case against Hernandez, who's serving a 45-year sentence.

Except that the first Trump administration launched the Hernandez investigation:

Jonah E. Bromwich at NYT:

When President Trump pardoned the former leader of Honduras this week, he erased the crowning achievement of years of work by one of his own former criminal defense lawyers and top Justice Department officials, Emil Bove III.

Mr. Bove, a firm believer in the prerogatives of executive power, became known for defending Mr. Trump against several prosecutions, and his profile rose further when, at the Justice Department, he oversaw the firing of dozens of prosecutors and F.B.I. agents Mr. Trump perceived as enemies. In May, the president nominated him as a federal appeals court judge and the Senate confirmed him in July.

But before that, Mr. Bove was a hard-charging prosecutor in Manhattan bent on convicting members of a Honduran drug-trafficking conspiracy.

From 2015 to when he left the job in 2021, Mr. Bove helped lead the investigation that identified Honduras as a key conduit for cocaine shipments into the United States. The inquiry revealed the violence that had cleared a pathway for the drugs through Honduras, as the country’s officials mowed down anyone who sought to thwart them. And it ultimately led to the conviction in 2024 of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who prosecutors said had been at the center of the conspiracy.

 

A Looming Act of War

 Previous posts have discussed presidential decisions to kill suspected terrorists. (See NYT story on the "kill list.") 

Columbia law professor Matthew C. Waxman at CFR:

Trump reportedly determined and notified Congress that the U.S. government is involved in an “armed conflict”—i.e. a legal state of war— with drug cartels, marking the latest in an escalating series of legal moves by the administration. It previously designated some cartels as FTOs, unlocking certain criminal law, immigration, and sanctions authorities. It has invoked a 1798 law authorizing the swift removal from the United States of “enemy aliens,” and applied it to suspected Tren de Aragua members. It has used lethal force against alleged Tren de Aragua drug vessels in the Caribbean, claiming national self-defense.

One of the most significant implications of this declaration is that it purports to justify using lethal force against some unspecified categories of cartel members, essentially treating them as enemy soldiers. Because the Trump administration has provided so little information about the strikes and their legal justifications, however, it’s unclear how far the White House is stretching this theory.

The closest analogy is the ongoing armed conflict against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, which is a more legally precise term for the “Global War on Terror.” That’s been the legal basis, across five presidential administrations now, for lethal force and detention of al-Qaeda fighters. The Trump administration seems to be applying that same template, but this time against drug cartels instead of a transnational terrorist group.

But that’s a dangerous stretch. Al-Qaeda had declared war on the United States and attacked U.S. warships, embassies, military headquarters, and financial capital, killing thousands of Americans with the equivalent of missiles. If a state had carried out those attacks, no one would dispute that we were in a war.

Major international cartels are brutally violent and drug trafficking is an enormously destructive problem in the United States, so the Trump administration is right to combat them aggressively. The administration may also believe, with reason, that international drug trafficking is a grave threat to the safety of Americans, and perhaps there are important roles for American military forces in dealing with it. But, to date, the administration hasn’t persuasively made the legal case that drug cartels are waging war against us like al-Qaeda was, nor is it clear whether the White House acknowledges any limits to its theory—one that unlocks the most extreme legal powers a state can wield. Part of the problem is that the Trump administration has been so opaque about its legal basis and about the facts surrounding its recent strikes. That’s a mistake that exacerbates the legal problems.

...

So far, the Trump administration has used lethal force against drug vessels at sea, but it has also suggested that it might do so in the territory of other states, like Venezuela or Mexico. That would be a major escalation, and it raises additional legal issues because the UN Charter prohibits the use of force against the territorial integrity of UN member states. Unless those states consent, which is unlikely, the administration would probably claim that it was justified because they were unwilling or unable to neutralize the threat against the United States. That would be a radical extension of past precedents, and I believe a misguided one.

Extrajudicial Killing

 Tom Nichols at The Atlantic writes about deadly military attacks against boats in international waters:

The Trump administration’s justification for these strikes, such as it is, seems to be that any shipment of drugs connected to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is a direct threat to the United States. These “narco-terrorists” may therefore be destroyed on sight, and without the fuss of asking permission from the U.S. Congress. This argument reflects the president’s childlike but dangerous understanding of his role as commander in chief. The United States, once the leader of a global system of security and economic cooperation, is now acting like a rogue state on the high seas.

The White House position is wrong on many levels. I taught the rules and theories that govern the use of force to military officers at the Naval War College for many years, and every summer for two decades to civilians at Harvard; I always reminded students that international law and traditions require states to show that they are acting in some form of self-defense, either in response to an attack or to forestall more violence. Moreover, American law does not permit the president to designate people as terrorists and then declare open season on them in defiance of international agreements and without any involvement from Congress. Perhaps Trump’s people are watching too many Tom Clancy movies, but he cannot legally send the Navy out onto the world’s oceans as though they are seagoing sheriffs with satchels full of death warrants.

No one in the White House seems to care very much about the rules that govern killing people, at home or abroad, but these rules actually exist. International law allows interdicting contraband—drugs, weapons, captured human beings—under many circumstances, and countries execute such missions legally every day. These activities require great care to limit the danger to the military and the loss of civilian life, including diligently identifying suspect vessels, warning them to stop, and sometimes boarding them to identify and seize their cargo.

Military ships can engage these targets in combat under limited conditions. If they open fire on American vessels, for example, no one would deny that they’re signing their own death warrant. But in general, when states want to initiate the use of force in the international arena, their arguments are subject to what international law calls “the Caroline test,” an 1837 case that led the U.S. to agree that to employ force, a threat must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.” This is an elegant way of saying that nations can use violence in self-defense when they have neither the time nor ability to do anything else. What constitutes an “imminent” threat is an ongoing debate among international lawyers, but the recent Venezuela strikes do not appear to fall even remotely under any of this doctrine.

Drug Deaths Plunged in 2024

Many posts have discussed substance abuse.

David Ovalle at WP:

U.S. drug deaths plunged in 2024, according to federal data published Wednesday, offering hope that public health measures are paying off even as the toll remains high.

Though there doesn’t seem to be a single variable to attribute to the gains, the drop in overdose deaths comes amid concerns that cuts to federal public health agencies and proposals to cut Medicaid could undercut progress.

An estimated 80,391 people died from drugs in 2024, a decrease of nearly 27 percent from the previous year, according to provisional state data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Deaths from synthetic opioids — chiefly fentanyl, which has fueled the overdose crisis during the past decade — played a role in the majority of drug deaths but tumbled by nearly 28,000 fatalities, the estimates show.

...

What explains the drop?

The opioid crisis began decades ago with highly addictive prescription pain killers flooding states. Users later turned to cheaper street heroin, which was largely replaced by fentanyl manufactured by Mexican organized crime groups with precursor chemicals sourced from China. The synthetic drug can be up to 50 times more potent than heroin.

No single reason explains the sudden drop in deaths, researchers and health officials stress.

The Biden administration credited seizures of fentanyl at the southern border, arrests of high-level Mexican drug traffickers and cooperation from Beijing to crack down on unscrupulous Chinese companies exporting precursor chemicals. The administration also expanded access to addiction treatment medications such as buprenorphine, which wards off opioid withdrawals, and the overdose reversal drug naloxone. It also embraced harm reduction organizations that have saturated communities with free naloxone, fentanyl test strips and sterile needles to users.

Fentanyl Madness

Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.  Some whoppers involve drugs.

Lev Facher at STAT:

In recent months, federal prosecutors indicted a Georgia man for “possessing enough fentanyl to kill up to 500,000 individuals.” A sheriff in South Carolina announced the seizure of fentanyl that “had the potential to kill more than 800,000 people.” Perhaps most impressively, California Highway Patrol officers estimated they seized enough of the opioid to kill “a quarter of the population” of the entire state — some 10 million people.

Last week, however, Attorney General Pam Bondi put other law enforcement to shame with a staggering new claim: that drug busts during the first 100 days of the Trump administration had saved 119 million lives. (She soon issued a correction, announcing at last week’s Cabinet meeting that the true figure was more than twice as high: 258 million.)

The claim is implausible on many levels. Nowhere near 258 million Americans use drugs that could even potentially contain fentanyl. The large majority of fentanyl is consumed by a tiny subset of Americans with vastly higher tolerances than the 2-milligram dose that officials say could cause an overdose in unwitting users. Even when overdoses do occur, many can be reversed using naloxone and other techniques. And by Bondi’s logic, if law enforcement continued to seize fentanyl at the same rate for another month or so, the Trump administration could claim credit for saving every single American from a fatal drug overdose.

...

In the 1930s, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics called marijuana “the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.” For decades, drug enforcement officials have warned of Halloween candy tainted with drugs, though no such occurrence has ever been documented. And in recent years, numerous police officers have claimed to experience opioid “overdoses” during routine interactions — despite the de facto impossibility of breathing in fentanyl or absorbing it through skin.

Marijuana Can Be Addictive

Many posts have discussed the politics of cannabis.

From NIH:

Between 1995 and 2022 the delta-9 THC potency (strength) in illegal cannabis products seized by law enforcement quadrupled from 3.96% to 16.14%. Cannabis flower and concentrates in dispensaries can have THC concentrations of more than 40%.3 Higher THC concentrations have been associated with a greater likelihood of cannabis use progressing to cannabis use disorder, among other health concerns.4

Megan TwoheyDanielle Ivory and Carson Kessler at NYT

About 18 million people — nearly a third of all users ages 18 and up — have reported symptoms of cannabis use disorder, according to estimates from a unique data analysis conducted for The Times by a Columbia University epidemiologist. That would mean they continue to use the drug despite significant negative effects on their lives. Of those, about three million people are considered addicted.

The estimates are based on responses to the 2022 U.S. national drug use survey from people who reported any cannabis consumption within the previous year. The results are especially stark among 18- to 25-year-olds: More than 4.5 million use the drug daily or near daily, according to the estimates, and 81 percent of those users meet the criteria for the disorder.

“That means almost everybody that uses it every day is reporting problems with it,” said Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who was not involved in the analysis. “That is a very clear warning sign.”

Drug Recriminalization in Oregon

Keith Humphreys and Rob Bovett at The Atlantic:

America’s most radical experiment with drug decriminalization has ended after more than three years of painful results. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has pledged to sign legislation repealing the principal elements of the ballot initiative known as Measure 110: Possessing hard drugs is again a crime in Oregon, and courts will return to mandating treatment for offenders. Oregonians had supported Measure 110 with 59 percent of the vote in 2020, but three years later, polling showed that 64 percent wanted some or all of it repealed. Although the measure was touted by advocates as a racial-justice policy, support for its repeal was especially strong among African American and Hispanic Oregonians.
...

Measure 110 did not reduce Oregon’s drug problems. The drug-overdose-death rate increased by 43 percent in 2021, its first year of implementation—and then kept rising. The latest CDC data show that in the 12 months ending in September 2023, deaths by overdose grew by 41.6 percent, versus 2.1 percent nationwide. No other state saw a higher rise in deaths. Only one state, Vermont, ranks higher in its rate of illicit drug use.

Neither did decriminalization produce a flood of help-seeking. The replacement for criminal penalties, a $100 ticket for drug possession with the fine waived if the individual called a toll-free number for a health assessment, with the aim of encouraging treatment, failed completely. More than 95 percent of people ignored the ticket, for which—in keeping with the spirit of Measure 110—there was no consequence. The cost of the hotline worked out to about $7,000 per completed phone call, according to The Economist. These realities, as well as associated disorder such as open-air drug markets and a sharp rise in violent crime—while such crime was falling nationally—led Oregonians to rethink their drug policy.

...

We were not surprised that a trivial pressure to seek treatment was ineffective. Fentanyl and meth addiction are not like depression, chronic pain, or cancer, conditions for which people are typically motivated to seek treatment. Even as it destroys a person’s life, addictive drug use by definition feels good in the short term, and most addicted people resist or are ambivalent about giving that up. Withdrawal, meanwhile, is wrenchingly difficult. As a result, most addicted people who come to treatment do so not spontaneously but through pressure from family, friends, employers, health professionals, and, yes, the law.

But it wasn’t just that the measure’s proponents misunderstood addiction. They also did not understand Oregon, a state in which the measure’s biggest funders did not live. Branding Measure 110 as a rebuke to the War on Drugs made no sense, because Oregon had never fought such a war. In 1973, it became the first state to decriminalize possession of marijuana. When federal and state mandatory-minimum sentences for drug crimes flowered in the ’80s and ’90s, Oregon went the other way, making it impossible for someone to go to prison for simple drug possession. Overall, the state had the country’s lowest rate of imprisonment for nonviolent crimes. Short local-jail sentences for drug possession were permitted, but diversion programs, including drug courts and community supervision with drug testing, were widely used. However, after Measure 110 was passed and the threat of jail time eliminated, the flow of people into these programs slowed.

Alcohol Deaths

Many posts have discussed substance abuse.

Isabella Cueto  and J. Emory Parker at STAT:

Alcohol sales per capita went up more from 2019 to 2021 than in any two-year period since 1969, according to estimates from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Deaths from excessive alcohol use are also rising, as are deaths where the underlying cause of death was alcohol-related. And it’s not just liver disease. Alcohol has been linked with over 200 conditions, impacting basically every single organ system.

American Men and Life Expectancy

 A release from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

We’ve known for more than a century that women outlive men. But new research led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and UC San Francisco shows that, at least in the United States, the gap has been widening for more than a decade. The trend is being driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid overdose epidemic, among other factors.

In a research paper, to be published online on November 13 in JAMA Internal Medicine, the authors found the difference between how long American men and women live increased to 5.8 years in 2021, the largest it’s been since 1996. This is an increase from 4.8 years in 2010, when the gap was at its smallest in recent history.

The pandemic, which took a disproportionate toll on men, was the biggest contributor to the widening gap from 2019-2021, followed by unintentional injuries and poisonings (mostly drug overdoses), accidents, and suicide.

“There’s been a lot of research into the decline in life expectancy in recent years, but no one has systematically analyzed why the gap between men and women has been widening since 2010,” said first author Brandon Yan, a UCSF internal medicine resident physician and research collaborator at Harvard Chan School.

Life expectancy in the U.S. dropped in 2021 to 76.1 years, falling from 78.8 years in 2019 and 77 years in 2020.

The shortening lifespan of Americans has been attributed in part to so-called “deaths of despair.” The term refers to the increase in deaths from such causes as suicide, drug use disorders, and alcoholic liver disease, which are often connected with economic hardship, depression, and stress.

“While rates of death from drug overdose and homicide have climbed for both men and women, it is clear that men constitute an increasingly disproportionate share of these deaths,” Yan said.

Using data from the National Center for Health Statistics, Yan and fellow researchers from around the country identified the causes of death that were lowering life expectancy the most. Then they estimated the effects on men and women to see how much different causes were contributing to the gap.

Prior to the COVID pandemic, the largest contributors were unintentional injuries, diabetes, suicide, homicide, and heart disease.

But during the pandemic, men were more likely to die of the virus. That was likely due to a number of reasons, including differences in health behaviors, as well as social factors, such as the risk of exposure at work, reluctance to seek medical care, incarceration, and housing instability. Chronic metabolic disorders, mental illness, and gun violence also contributed.

Yan said the results raise questions about whether more specialized care for men, such as in mental health, should be developed to address the growing disparity in life expectancy.

“We have brought insights to a worrisome trend,” Yan said. “Future research ought to help focus public health interventions towards helping reverse this decline in life expectancy.”

Yan and co-authors, including senior author Howard Koh, professor of the practice of public health leadership at Harvard Chan School, also noted that further analysis is needed to see if these trends change after 2021.

“We need to track these trends closely as the pandemic recedes,” Koh said. “And we must make significant investments in prevention and care to ensure that this widening disparity, among many others, do not become entrenched.”

Alan Geller, senior lecturer on social and behavioral sciences at Harvard Chan School, was also a co-author.

“Widening Gender Gap in Life Expectancy in the US, 2010-2021,” Brandon W. Yan, Elizabeth Erias, Alan C. Geller, Donald R. Miller, Kenneth D. Kochanek, Howard K. Koh, JAMA Internal Medicine, online November 13, 2023, doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.6041

Education and Overdose

Many posts have discussed iinequality and higher education.

October 6, 2023  

David Powell, "Educational Attainment and US Drug Overdose Deaths"

JAMA Health Forum. 2023;4(10):e233274. doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2023.3274

Key Points

Question  Was educational attainment associated with overdose death rate growth in the US from 2000 to 2021?

Findings  In this cross-sectional study of 912 057 overdose deaths in the US from 2000 to 2021, overdose deaths increased sharply among individuals without any college education. The overdose death rate increased substantially between 2018 and 2021 for those without a high school diploma, primarily due to increases in deaths with synthetic opioid involvement.

Meaning  In this study, educational attainment, an important component of socioeconomic status, was found to be associated with overdose deaths, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Opioid Abuse and Deaths of Despir

National Institute on Drug Abuse:

In 2021, an estimated 2.5 million people aged 18 years or older in the U.S. had opioid use disorder in the past year, yet only 1 in 5 of them (22%) received medications to treat it, according to a new study Some groups were substantially less likely to receive medication for opioid use disorder, including Black adults, women, those who were unemployed, and those in nonmetropolitan areas.

 Chun-Tung Kuo, and Ichiro Kawachi at JAMA Network: "County-Level Income Inequality, Social Mobility, and Deaths of Despair in the US, 2000-2019."

Question  Is the interaction between income inequality and social mobility associated with an increased risk of deaths of despair (deaths from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic liver disease) among the working-age population in the US?

Findings  In this cross-sectional study, higher income inequality and lower social mobility were associated with a higher burden of deaths of despair for Black, Hispanic, and White populations. In addition, the joint exposure of unequal income distribution and lack of social mobility was associated with additional risks of deaths of despair on both the additive and multiplicative scales.

Meaning  The findings of this study suggest that policy responses to the epidemic of deaths of despair must address the underlying social and economic conditions associated with these deaths.

Homelessness in California

A number of posts have dealt with homelessness.  

 A release from UC San Francisco:

The University of California, San Francisco BenioffHomelessness and Housing Initiative (BHHI) today released the largest representative study ofhomelessness in the United States since the mid-1990s, providing a comprehensive look at the causes and consequences of homelessness in California and recommending policy changes to shape programs in response. 

The California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness (CASPEH) used surveys and in-depth interviews to develop a clear portrait of homelessness in California, where 30% of the nation’s homeless population and half of the unsheltered population live.

The study found that, for most of the participants, the cost of housing had simply become unsustainable. Participants reported a median monthly household income of $960 in the six months prior to their homelessness, and most believed that either rental subsidies or one-time financial help would have prevented their homelessness.

...  

The study found that the state’s homeless popula`on is aging, with 47% of all adults aged 50 or older, and that Black and Native Americans are dramatically overrepresented. Contrary to myths of homeless migration, most were Californians: 90% of participants lost their last housing in California and 75% of participants live in the same county as where they were last housed. Nine out of ten spent time unsheltered since they became homeless. The median length of homelessness was 22 months.

One in five participants entered homelessness from an institution. Of those who hadn’t been in an institution, 60% came from situations where they weren’t leaseholders, such as doubling up with family or friends. Participants were disconnected from the job market and services, but almost half were looking for work.

...

 Participants had experienced multiple forms of trauma throughout their life, increasing their vulnerability to homelessness and contributing to their mental health and substance use challenges. Two-thirds reported current mental health symptoms and more than a third experienced physical or sexual violence during this episode of homelessness. More than a third had visited an Emergency Department in the prior six months. One in five who used substances reported that they wanted substance use treatment—but couldn’t get it. 

Religion and Deaths of Despair

Opiates of the Masses? Deaths of Despair and the Decline of American ReligionTyler Giles, Daniel M. Hungerman, and Tamar OostromNBER Working Paper No. 30840January 2023JEL No. I18,J11,Z12

Abstract:

In recent decades, death rates from poisonings, suicides, and alcoholic liver disease have dramatically increased in the United States. We show that these "deaths of despair" began to increase relative to trend in the early 1990s, that this increase was preceded by a decline in religious participation, and that both trends were driven by middle-aged white Americans. Using repeals of blue laws as a shock to religiosity, we confirm that religious practice has significant effects on these mortality rates. Our findings show that social factors such as organized religion can play an important role in understanding deaths of despair.

Life Expectancy Drops Again

Kate Sheridan at STAT:

Americans born in 2021 can expect to live for just 76.1 years — the lowest life expectancy has been since 1996, according to a new government analysis published Wednesday. This is the biggest two-year decline — 2.7 years in total — in almost 100 years.

The Covid-19 pandemic is the primary cause of the decline. However, increases in the number of people dying from overdoses and accidents is also a significant factor.

American Indian and Alaskan Native people have experienced a particularly precipitous drop in life expectancy since 2019, going from 71.8 to 65.2 years. This kind of loss is similar to the plunge seen for all Americans after the Spanish Flu, said Robert Anderson, the chief of the mortality statistics branch of the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

...

This year’s life expectancy figure is 0.9 years lower than last year’s. Covid-19 accounted for about half of the decline, and a category encompassing accidents and unintentional injuries is responsible for another 16%. That category includes overdoses; in fact, about half of the unintentional injury deaths in this analysis were due to overdoses.
...

Not every demographic group saw the same changes, the researchers found. Asian-Americans have the highest life expectancy of any group — 83.5 years — and only saw a 0.1 year decline from 2020. Meanwhile, Black Americans lost 0.7 years between 2020 to 2021.

But American Indian and Native Americans saw the largest loss of life expectancy of all — 1.9 years less than 2020’s life expectancy, and 6.6 years less than 2019’s. They also had the lowest life expectancy among the groups studied. (Historically, Native Americans’ life expectancy has been staying level even in years when the life expectancy of the entire population did increase, one recent study found.)

Guns: Leading Cause of Death among Children and Adolescents

Jason E. Goldstick, Ph.D. Rebecca M. Cunningham, M.D.  Patrick M. Carter, M.D at The New England Journal of Medicine:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released updated official mortality data that showed 45,222 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2020 — a new peak.1 Although previous analyses have shown increases in firearm-related mortality in recent years (2015 to 2019), as compared with the relatively stable rates from earlier years (1999 to 2014),2,3 these new data show a sharp 13.5% increase in the crude rate of firearm-related death from 2019 to 2020.1 This change was driven largely by firearm homicides, which saw a 33.4% increase in the crude rate from 2019 to 2020, whereas the crude rate of firearm suicides increased by 1.1%.1 Given that firearm homicides disproportionately affect younger people in the United States,3 these data call for an update to the findings of Cunningham et al. regarding the leading causes of death among U.S. children and adolescents.

 The previous analysis, which examined data through 2016, showed that firearm-related injuries were second only to motor vehicle crashes (both traffic-related and nontraffic-related) as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents, defined as persons 1 to 19 years of age.4 Since 2016, that gap has narrowed, and in 2020, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death in that age group (Figure 1). From 2019 to 2020, the relative increase in the rate of firearm-related deaths of all types (suicide, homicide, unintentional, and undetermined) among children and adolescents was 29.5% — more than twice as high as the relative increase in the general population. The increase was seen across most demographic characteristics and types of firearm-related death (Fig. S1 in the Supplementary Appendix, available with the full text of this letter at NEJM.org).

In addition, drug overdose and poisoning increased by 83.6% from 2019 to 2020 among children and adolescents, becoming the third leading cause of death in that age group. This change is largely explained by the 110.6% increase in unintentional poisonings from 2019 to 2020. The rates for other leading causes of death have remained relatively stable since the previous analysis, which suggests that changes in mortality trends among children and adolescents during the early Covid-19 pandemic were specific to firearm-related injuries and drug poisoning; Covid-19 itself resulted in 0.2 deaths per 100,000 children and adolescents in 2020.1

Although the new data are consistent with other evidence that firearm violence has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic,5 the reasons for the increase are unclear, and it cannot be assumed that firearm-related mortality will later revert to prepandemic levels. Regardless, the increasing firearm-related mortality reflects a longer-term trend and shows that we continue to fail to protect our youth from a preventable cause of death. Generational investments are being made in the prevention of firearm violence, including new funding opportunities from the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, and funding for the prevention of community violence has been proposed in federal infrastructure legislation. This funding momentum must be maintained.

Leading Causes of Death among Children and Adolescents in the United States, 1999 through 2020.



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Penetrable

On September 18, 2019, the 45th president said:

Now, the wall still, obviously, has a ways to go, but we're building it at a breakneck speed. I wanted them to show you the interior of parts of the wall and what's inside of each individual slat. And you'll see it's a combination of steel, concrete, and—as one of the folks just said—it really is virtually impenetrable. Any walls that were put up would get knocked down very quickly, very easily. This wall is not something that can be really knocked down. I guess anything can, but this is very tough.

Nick Miroff at WP:

Mexican smuggling gangs have sawed through new segments of border wall 3,272 times over the past three years, according to unpublished U.S. Customs and Border Protection maintenance records obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act.

The government spent $2.6 million to repair the breaches during the 2019 to 2021 fiscal years, the CBP records show. While the agency has acknowledged that smugglers are able to hack through the new barriers built by the Trump administration, the maintenance records show damage has been more widespread than previously known, pointing to the structure’s limitations as an impediment to illegal crossings.

Smuggling gangs typically cut the barrier with inexpensive power tools widely available at retail hardware stores, including angle grinders and demolition saws. Once the 18-to-30-foot-tall bollards are severed near the ground, their only remaining point of attachment is at the top of the structure, leaving the steel beam dangling in the air. It easily swings open with a push, creating a gap wide enough for people and narcotics to pass through.

Deaths: COVID and Overdose

The U.S. faces other steep disadvantages, ones that experts worry could cause additional problems. For example, many Americans have health problems like obesity and diabetes that increase the risk of severe Covid. https://t.co/Ie4YT3jLlI

— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 2, 2022

Jon Kamp, Jennifer Levitz, Brianna Abbott and Paul Overberg at WSJ:

Two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, America’s death toll is closing in on one million.

Federal authorities estimate that 987,456 more people have died since early 2020 than would have otherwise been expected, based on long-term trends. People killed by coronavirus infections account for the overwhelming majority of cases. Thousands more died from derivative causes, like disruptions in their healthcare and a spike in overdoses.


Covid-19 has left the same proportion of the population dead—about 0.3%—as did World War II, and in less time.

Unlike the 1918 flu pandemic or major wars, which hit younger people, Covid-19 has been particularly hard on vulnerable seniors. It has also killed thousands of front-line workers and disproportionately affected minority populations.

It robbed society of grandparents, parents, spouses, sons and daughters, best friends, mentors, loyal employees and bosses. Those lost include a 55-year-old Rhode Island correctional officer; a 46-year-old Texas dental-office receptionist who helped care for her granddaughter; a 30-year-old Iowan who fatally overdosed; and an active 72-year-old and grandmother of 15 who was Nashville’s first female city bus driver.

“It’s catastrophic,” said Steven Woolf, director emeritus at the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “This is an enormous loss of life.”

O. Trent Hall and colleagues have an article at JAMA Pediatrics titled "Unintentional Drug Overdose Mortality in Years of Life Lost Among Adolescents and Young People in the US From 2015 to 2019."

 Over the 5-year period of this cross-sectional study, adolescents experienced nearly 200 000 YLL, and young people amassed greater than 1.25 million YLL [years of life lost]. Male adolescents and young people accounted for substantially greater unintentional drug overdose mortality (YLL and incident deaths) than female adolescents and young people. Although limited by death records potentially undercounting overdoses and a cross-sectional design insensitive to temporal relations between risk factors and deaths, our findings represent an unacceptable preventable mortality burden for adolescents and young people in the US. Prior research has identified polysubstance use, psychiatric comorbidity, and unstable housing as relevant risk factors for unintentional drug overdose in this age cohort.6 Our findings suggest that further resources are needed to mitigate these factors. The present study should inform future mortality reviews among adolescents and young people, as well as ecologic interventions involving family, school, and community, in unintentional drug overdose prevention and substance use treatment.