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Michael R. Brumage: Adverse childhoods affecting our drug, obesity problems [WVGazetteMail.com]

 

We are beset by vexing public health problems in West Virginia: the opioid and heroin epidemic, the damaging effects of obesity and tobacco-related illnesses.

We pay dearly for those problems directly through rising health care costs and increased taxes to cover those costs, and indirectly in human terms, as productive lives are cut short by illness, disability and death.

Furthermore, we are encouraging these rising health costs by pricing substances like tobacco and sugary drinks without offsetting the expenses we all pay down the road.

Our attempts at solutions have focused on proximate causes: anti-drug campaigns, smoking cessation and obesity reduction, among others.

They are necessary but insufficient.

Effective preventive solutions have evaded us because we have failed to ask the right questions. All of our public health problems are demand-driven, and so it should come as no surprise that supply-restricting solutions inevitably fail without addressing the demand side of the equation.

For more of this story, written by Michael R. Brumage, go to http://www.wvgazettemail.com/g...rug-obesity-problems]

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