Smalltown America gets lethally addicted
Tuesday 19 March 2019.
In 2018, the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that deaths as a result of the opioid fentanyl were up by 29%. The number of opioid prescriptions has risen steeply: there were 10 million more prescriptions in 2017 than in 2007, and the rate of prescription was four times higher in the north of England than in London. The destructive reach of opioids has recently been flagged by photographer Nan Goldin, who refuses to exhibit in galleries funded by the Sackler family, which owns the Purdue Pharma group that makes OxyContin. Goldin intends to boycott London’s National Portrait Gallery, where she was invited to display a retrospective of her work, if it accepts a gift of more than $ 1 million from the Sacklers. This protest has brought the spread of OxyContin, and its powerful synthetic cousins fentanyl and carfentanil, into public view in the UK. As Maxime Robin reported a year ago, by the time the authorities realised the extent of the problem in the US, it was too late.
