Mortality from Drug Overdoses is Far Higher Than Police Shootings But BLM Supporters Can’t Understand the Math

Executive Summary

• BLM was able to get an enormous turnout of people to protest for what is a minimal mathematical risk of mortality.

Introduction

Blacks and black-run organizations like BLM have demonstrated a pattern using emotionalism and zero mathematical analysis to come to their conclusions about the most important issues related to mortality. This caused them to react to police shootings of only blacks emotionally and provide false claims to the public about this actual risk.

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BLM and BLM protesters have many shirts and signs that state their view that police are shooting them in large numbers. 

BLM protesters are shown in this video as absolutely apoplectic about George Floyd and similar police shootings of black (and only blacks, others shot by police who are not black are never discussed by BLM or by blacks in general).

Far Higher Relative Risk #1: General Health Issues

The problem is that the number one killer of blacks is not even violent crime but health issues.

Experts say there’s a major health disparity in those who come with customs from other countries to those who come to the United States and acclimate to a country where a third of all adults have obesity but half of all Black adults have obesityTrusted Source due to attitudes about and access to healthy foods and means of exercise. – Healthline

There are a lot of blacks could do to improve their health and reduce early mortality. And it can be done by one’s own attention to detail on eating healthier foods, exercising, and so on. But the interest in doing this is low as it would mean personal effort not being able to point to finger at someone else.

Black women have a pattern of accepting very high body weights, and this should be addressed as being so heavy has health consequences. A charity focused on black obesity, if even somewhat effective, would have a far stronger outcome in improving mortality for blacks than BLM. 

It is difficult to get people to follow health instructions, but far more straightforward of a matter to get them to get angry and appear at a BLM protest.

Far Higher Relative Risk #2: The Relative Risk of Drug Overdoses

Another health topic that is enormously more important than the number of deaths from police shootings is drug overdoses. This is explained in the following quotation.

Johnson & Johnson agreed to a $26 billion joint settlement Friday to thousands of claims by state and local governments over the alleged roles it and three other companies played in the opioid pandemic.

Distributors McKesson Corp, AmerisourceBergen Corp, and Cardinal Health Inc. also settled, agreeing to pay up to $21 billion over 18 years, while Johnson & Johnson said it would pay $5 billion over nine years. Another $2 billion has been set aside for legal fees.

The lawsuits claim drugmaker Johnson & Johnson and the distributors downplayed the risks of addiction in marketing certain pain medication, including opioids.

But all four companies continue to face litigation in Alabama, Oklahoma, Washington, and West Virginia. Johnson & Johnson also faces litigation from New Hampshire. The lawsuits claim drugmaker Johnson & Johnson and the distributors downplayed the risks of addiction in marketing certain pain medication, including opioids. Nearly 841,000 people have died since 1999 from a drug overdose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most common lethal overdose in recent years stems from fentanyl, an opioid. – Washington Examiner

Some percentage of those drug overdoses are black. And significant companies from Purdue Pharma to Johnson and Johnson to McKesson and Cardinal Health, among others, knew that their policies were leading to many opioids overdoes, but they pursued profits. Per year, since 1999, that is 38,000 deaths from drug overdoses. However, it is challenging to find protests on the corporate and government promotion of opioids to the public.

This is a typical opioid protest, and it looks to be less than 20 people at this protest. Why is it so easy to get thousands to show up to a BLM protest when the claims of BLM are false in terms of blacks being shot out of proportion with their involvement in violent crime, while the numbers of something like drug overdoses is so dramatically more significant?

And drug overdoses are the tip of the iceberg of causes of mortality that are far higher than being shot by police.

Far Higher Relative Risk #3: Adverse Drug Reactions

All of the estimates I have read on adverse drug reaction deaths vastly understate the true mortality. For example, Vioxx was a deadly drug that killed tens of thousands of people per year. However, these deaths were uniformly categorized as either strokes or heart attacks, and many of these were caused by Vioxx.

As there were many pre-existing anti-inflammatory drugs, there was no reason for Vioxx to be approved by the FDA. However, the FDA is highly controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. Even the FDA estimates around 50,000 deaths per year (albeit in older people who tended to take Vioxx). As the FDA is a protector of the drug companies, the number was much higher than this. Another recent drug that caused deaths and serious side effects were the covid vaccines. We covered this topic in the article How Safe Are The Covid 19 Vaccines?

These are drugs that did not work and were 100% adverse effects. However, to protect pharmaceutical companies and to reduce “vaccine hesitancy,” the CDC, FDA, NIH, and establishment media covered up the adverse effects, going so far as to criticize people that looked up the adverse effects in the government’s adverse reaction database as we cover in the article The Medical Establishment Resents the Calculation of Risk Using VAERS.

This is part of a long-term strategy by these health authorities not to have adverse drug reactions counted and to provide a misleading but profit-maximizing impression of drugs to the public, as we cover in the article How Adverse Drug Deaths Are Covered Up By Hospitals And The FDA.

Overall, we estimate that there must be over 300,000 adverse reactions from drugs every year in the US; many of these are avoidable because many of them are from drugs that never should have been approved. All that is necessary to make the FDA no longer corrupt.

Far Higher Relative Risk #4: Hospital Errors

Another major cause of death is from hospital errors, which I found is estimated at over 250,000 per year by the official sources, which means it is probably higher than this.

If we add the two previous items, we may arrive at roughly 600,000 people per year.

The effort to make changes in society will be the most significant where the mortality statistics are highest. However, no charity receives anything like the funding to reduce medical errors or adverse drug reactions, as does BLM.

A Ridiculous Overfocus on a Small Incidence of Mortality

Given the claimed interest in protesting and calling out injustice, blacks and many whites who also participate in BLM protests believe that police are much eviler and cause many more deaths than pharmaceutical executives. This indicates that these individuals can’t perform mathematical analysis, can only go off of emotion, and are easily led to false conclusions.

But if we move topics to just black murders, the murders by police of blacks in the US is between 1/25 and 1/30th of the murders every year of blacks, and other blacks murder around 90% of blacks that are murdered. Blacks are roughly 5x more violent than any other racial group in the US. And yet, we never hear this statistic stated by blacks. This very high level of violent crime explains the high number of blacks killed by police every year versus other races. This is described in the article Why the Claims by Black Lives Matter on Police Shootings Are False.

How Blacks Present All Black Shootings by Police

Black people and BLM usually present all murders of blacks by police as unlawful killings, and BLM makes sure to leave out the story or even makeup stories regarding the deaths of blacks at the hands of police.

Long after “Hand Up, Don’t Shoot” was discredited (in that it never happened and Michael Brown rushed the police officer), BLM continued to repeat the lie. This demonstrates that BLM and many blacks do not care what the facts of each case are, and they determine that police of guilty without evaluating the facts. 

BLM has tried to present all murders of blacks by police as unlawful killings, and BLM makes sure to leave out the story or even makeup stories regarding the deaths of blacks at the hands of police. However, of roughly 325 blacks killed per year by police, only around 18 are unarmed. Why are these other 300 or so blacks brandishing weapons in their interactions with police officers? Clearly, not all of these killings are murders as BLM proposes — although, there is an important question why the US has nearly 1000 police shootings that result in death, while Europe has so few. But that is not the argument made by BLM. The argument by BLM is that blacks are shot by police far out of proportion to whites. However, death from police shootings is just not a significant cause of death. Just compare the figures above with these recently reviewed numbers. There are more people that die every year from lawnmower accidents (around 33), than unarmed blacks who are killed by police.

Conclusion

Blacks generally and black organizations like BLM cannot perform relative risk analysis. Furthermore, they are providing false information to non-blacks and focusing on putting effort into changes that are essentially rounding errors to the far more significant causes of mortality. The concerning feature is that in addition to being unable to perform this analysis, I lack confidence that the vast majority of blacks and liberal whites could understand this article. That is they are indifferent to facts.