Reference no: EM133289625

In the article The Addicts Next Door, Margaret Talbot describes the effects of the opioid crisis in Berkeley County, West Virginia. What do you think is most responsible for the high rate of addiction there? Is it that people have lost jobs and turned to drugs from a sense of material deprivation? Is it that they lack social integration? Or is social integration weirdly part of the problem? What does Talbot mean when she writes, "In tight-knit Appalachian towns, heroin has become a social contagion. Nearly everyone I met in Martinsburg has ties to someone-a child, a sibling, a girlfriend, an in-law, an old high-school coach-who has struggled with opioids." Is the problem instead a lack of moral regulation? Or does the conflict approach associated with Karl Marx rather than the functionalist approach associated with Emile Durkheim make better sense of the problem? If your explanation is right, what is the best solution to the problem?