This is America – The Post

The first book by Francesco Costa, journalist and deputy editor of the Post, was released today. The book is titled This is America. “There are many places in the world that we know less than the United States of America,” Costa writes at the beginning of the book, “but there are no places with a wider gap than the United States between what we think we know and that that we actually know. ” Because of the gigantic American influence in our consumption and in our culture, in fact, “we think we know America well when in reality, in most cases, our idea is a mixture of clichés and little concrete information”, mixed to our “local political support”.

The book – the result of years of journalistic activity and field trips that Costa has told through the newsletter and the podcast From Costa to Costa – try to fill this gap through some stories that allow you to get to know the people who live in the most powerful country in the world a little better, by answering some frequent questions about America and Americans: why this absurd health system? Why don’t they want to get rid of weapons? What is the secret and the cost of the economic dominance of the United States? How do you get Barack Obama and Donald Trump to preside in a few years? We publish below an extract from the first chapter of the book, which deals with one of the great contemporary American stories least told and understood: the abuse of painkillers and its enormous consequences.

***

There is the fifty-year-old teacher who has never touched a cigarette, but starts taking opioid painkillers during chemotherapy and becomes addicted to it while recovering from cancer. There is the worker who has worked all his life in the factory and begins to take them on the advice of his doctor to treat chronic back pain. There is the young football player to whom painkillers are prescribed after a bad injury. There is the rock star known for her monastic life – Prince – who takes a painkiller to relieve hip pain and dies of an accidental overdose. The starting point is always different, the arrival point is almost never.

The scale of this epidemic is unprecedented. […] Between 1999 and 2018, nearly 800,000 people in the United States died of an overdose; the vast majority for opioid overdose. In 2017 alone, 70,237 died, twice as many as ten years before: around one hundred ninety every day, eight per hour, one every seven minutes. Ten times the total number of soldiers who have fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, more than all the dead soldiers in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined. All in one year: like the year before, like the one before and like the one after. Let that sink in, they would say, take a moment to absorb and weigh this information. The number of opioid overdose deaths that year in the United States did not only exceed the number of deaths from firearms: it exceeded the highest ever number of deaths from firearms in a single year (2017). It has not only exceeded the number of deaths from HIV: it has exceeded the highest ever number of deaths from HIV in a single year (1995). It has not only exceeded the number of deaths from road accidents: it has exceeded the maximum number ever recorded in road accidents in a single year (1972). […]

If in the United States the press has noticed this phenomenon late, the international media have almost completely ignored it: very little has been said, and less than almost everything else. It is not a novelty, nor a surprise. There are many places in the world that we know less about than the United States of America, of course, but there are no places with a wider gap than the United States between what we think we know and what we actually know. The US influence in our consumption is so gigantic and long-lived – and our bar culture and our need to show how long we know it is so great – that we think we know America well when in reality, in most cases , our idea is a mixture of commonplaces and little concrete information.

When we describe the absurd US healthcare system, we often do so by choosing two inaccurate and fallacious arguments, among the many valid ones that we would have available instead: the one for which if you do not have an insurance «they let you die on the street» (false) and the one for which “healthcare is paid” (why, in Italy who pays for it?). We believe Americans are all armed to the teeth – there are actually more weapons than people – but we don’t know that half of the weapons in circulation in America are owned by 3 percent of the population. […] We cultivate the cliché that the United States would use its heavy hand against tax evasion and the so-called white-collar crimes, but mostly black boys still go to jail. […] We are used to reading the entire US foreign policy primarily on the basis of oil, the need to find and import it at increasingly affordable prices, but today the United States is practically independent from an energy point of view. The list goes on.

In the impossibility of declaring ourselves surprised – it would mean that something of these Americans, perhaps we actually missed – at the end of the fair we welcome the most sensational election result in over two centuries of American history, the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election , like the logical and predictable consequence of our commonplaces, also entrusting them with the problematic explanation of its accidental, contradictory and never seen before characteristics – Trump took three million votes less than its opponent – as well as the fact that the same country , almost the same voters, a few years earlier twice had chosen by a large majority Barack Obama. We do all this on the basis of the things we believe we know, of our growing inability to answer “I don’t know” to any question or, worse still, adapting our local political support to the US context. All without having any knowledge of unavoidable events such as that concerning painkillers, for example, of the context that triggered them and their importance in defining what the United States of America and the people who live there are today.