In all, more than a quarter-million Americans died from drug overdoses, alcohol, traffic accidents, and homicides in 2020, a rise of over fifty thousand. Those deaths primarily occurred in younger people.16 Even excluding traffic accidents, the rise in deaths of despair in people under fifty—not the total number, but the increase from 2019 to 2020—

The only medicine in this category that we know helps reduce mortality is the steroid dexamethasone, and we only know that because of a trial in Britain. Here’s something else we know: the medical establishment, and especially the federal health bureaucracy, have been bizarrely reluctant to consider or test older and cheaper drugs.

La véritable réforme consisterait en la légalisation internationale, dans tous les pays, des drogues illégales, qui seraient dès lors vendues en pharmacie. La prohibition favorise en effet les mafias, isole les « addicts », transforme certains en délinquants ou en criminels pour se procurer leur drogue. La libéralisation supprimerait le pouvoir fin

Almost two years into the crisis, we have not just failed to find really effective new small-molecule drug treatments for Covid, we do not even know if a long list of cheap drugs that are already widely available might help.