The United States was founded on several key principles. Among these were, the idea that all people are created equal, whether European, Native American, or African American. Along with these, people having fundamental rights, such as liberty, free speech, freedom of religion, due process of law, and freedom of assembly. Fast forward to the twenty-first century and the founding fathers would be quite disappointed to see the disconnect within the inequalities of our society. The inequality within the United States are ones who are multi-layered. When looking at drug-related deaths, it can be said that there is a connection between socioeconomic statuses. When looking at studies conducted and books written on this relationship, it is quite evident that the socioeconomic status of people who are under the addiction of drugs has a significant impact on how likely they are to die from the addiction. There are direct links and inequalities within the relationship of poor drug users, in comparison to rich drug users. Society has set a monetary value on people’s lives under a system where money is a large part of a deciding factor for who gets to overcome their addiction, or who gets to become another death statistic on paper. The lower income class is half as likely to quit smoking, and roughly one-third less likely to overcome a cocaine addiction. There are several reasons as to why there is such a gap between the survivability rate when comparing lower-income citizens and upper-income citizens. These factors include the availability of treatment, the quality of the treatment and the treatment facilities, the pure fact of having the means and the social standard to get past the drug addiction. Furthermore, there is a psychological toll which ones socioeconomic class takes depending on where one lands.
Social Pressures Pushing Towards Addiction
The United States of America is broken up within three major economic groups—lower class, middle class, and upper class. The United States Census Bureau indicates the 2007 median household income as $61,372. To then find the middle class, the people who earn two-thirds of the median and double what the median is, are grouped together. This leaves people earning from $40,500 to $122,000 as the middle class. Anyone earning below this $40,500 threshold is considered lower class, and anyone earning above the $122,000 threshold is considered upper class. Breaking up the United States population like this may seem quite simple, however, it is much more complex than that as there are some factors which go into peoples every day lives such as the number of people in a household and the cost of living from state to state.
The number of people in a household has more of an impact than you may expect. Within these breakdowns of lower, middle, and upper class, there are no distinctions between the number of people which live under one roof. When taking the number of people under a household into consideration, the numbers show a big shift. For a one-person household, the middle class is between $24,000 to $73,000. For a five-person household, the middle-class income is about $54,000 to $162,000. The significance of this comes when talking about the fact that addiction does discriminate.
In society, we look towards addiction and call it a cause of something in life. Example, “He lost his job because of his drug addiction,” or, “he didn’t go to college because of his drug abuse.” However, because of the stigma around addiction, it is not left on the list for causes very high up. While it is true that both of these scenarios can be set forth as they are, there is also the possibility that other outside factors led to the loss of a job or little education and in the society which we live in, once someone is put in that position, addiction is a very attractive thing. The stress brought outside factors such as losing a job, losing a home, not earning a degree, which all affect socioeconomic class, is very high. In several studies conducted, stress was shown to be a clear risk factor of addiction. Furthering this, not only does stress push someone towards addiction, but also, the mere fact that they are on the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum will push someone towards addiction. The feeling of being poor is more than just not having enough money to pay for basic needs. The true damage which comes from being poor stems from the subjective experience of feeling poor. The active feeling within poor people of being less privileged compared to those around us has implications for behaviors which, generally, are worse. This is greatly exemplified in the famous Stanford Prison Experiment in which college students were randomly assigned to be either “guards” or “inmates” in a pretend jail. The experiment had to end early because normal young people were so negatively affected by their roles in this oppressive situation: the “guards” became brutal and even sadistic, while the “prisoners” were traumatized. When the college students were pushed into their roles, they were very quickly fully submerged into their roles which the society within the experiment pushed onto them. As poor people have societal views on them, they are expected to be drug addicts. It ends up being their roll in society and these psychological pressures wear down people and they are left to their addictions.
In continuation of the psychological effects of socio-economic status, there is a study where four American scientists traveled to India and carried out an experiment with sugarcane farmers. These farmers collect about 60% of their annual income all at once, right after the harvest. This means they are relatively poor one part of the year and rich the other. The researchers asked the farmers to do an IQ test before and after the harvest. What they discovered blew my mind. The farmers scored much worse on the tests before the harvest. The effects of living in poverty, it turns out, correspond to losing 14 IQ points. Living in poverty psychologically makes people make poorer decisions.
Drug Abuse Within Socio-economic Classes
Drug abuse over the different social classes has an interesting look. A study published in Social Science & Medicine showed that individuals with a history of belonging to a lower-income socioeconomic group were more likely to engage in heavy drinking or binge drinking (the consumption of five or more drinks in one sitting), while individuals in higher-income groups were more likely to engage in light or social drinking. Individuals from a working-class background were more likely to indulge in heavy drinking; however, they were also more likely to be completely abstinent from alcohol than the white-collar Americans who were studied. This study is a great representation of how the statistical curve of drug abusers with parameters to socio-economic class can be represented as a bimodal distribution. This shows the numbers on the two ends of the spectrum—lower class and upper class— as the high consumers of drugs, —alcohol in this study. This curve shows that the average middle-class American is not as big of a contributor to the statistics when it comes to overdoses. This is important to mention because it allows to more clearly see the divide between the lower socio-economical class and the upper socio-economical class. The divide brought to light within this study, in particular, is evidence that drug abuse is discriminatory, it is something that, given other outside factors, is more compelling to one class or another. Looking at the extreme lower socio-economic class, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimates that 34.7 percent of homeless adults living in shelters have drug or alcohol use disorders; however, this number does not account for the thousands of homeless people who live unsheltered in the streets. Moreover, a study was done to examine the association of three indicators of family socio-economic status during childhood—income, wealth, and parental education— with smoking, alcohol use, and Marijuana use during young adulthood. Data was obtained from the national Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a survey of U.S. families that incorporates data from parents and their children. In 2005 and 2007, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics was supplemented with two waves of Transition into Adulthood data drawn from a national sample of young adults, 18–23 years old. Data from the young adults on their current use of alcohol, cigarettes, and Marijuana were used as outcome variables in logistic regressions. Socioeconomic background was calculated from parental reports of education, wealth, and income during the respondent's childhood. This study came to the conclusion that, based on these three indicators of family background socio-economic status, smoking in young adulthood was associated with lower childhood family socio-economic status. Alcohol use and Marijuana use in young adulthood were associated with higher childhood family socio-economic status. This team of scientist ultimately correlated the Marijuana and Alcohol with the high socio-economic status because of their environment. Their ability to go to college, to be in the environment where Marijuana and Alcohol were easily accessible, facilitated the consumption. Furthermore, there are studies which also further this thought as they state that the college student is the largest statistic using Marijuana and Alcohol. Although, there is even more confirming evidence when a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that people people living in high income areas had the highest alcohol and Marijuana consumption rates. It deviates however, when talking about Heroin. Heroin use in Americans with an annual income of $20,000- $49,000 had the highest increase, at 77%. Those with an income of less than $20,000 rolled in at a 60% increase in heroin use.