Here Is The Morbidity and Mortality Information You’ve Been Waiting For

I’ve been browsing recent issues of the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, as one does on a lazy Saturday morning, and a recent issue provided a bit more information about the popularity of vaping. It’s not the precise data I’d like, but it’s a little more than I had the last time I wrote about it. This chart shows not just whether high-school students vaped during the past 30 days, but how often they vaped compared to cigarette users:

There are two things missing from this. First, it’s an average of 2015-2017. We know that vaping has been on the rise, so this probably underestimates e-cigarette use somewhat. Second, it doesn’t distinguish between nicotine and non-nicotine vaping. At a guess, non-nicotine vaping dominates the 1-10 day categories, but nicotine vaping dominates the 10-30 day categories. Also note that the raw data used in this report shows these categories as a percent of people who use the products. I converted this into total use assuming that 5 percent of high school students use cigarettes (cited here) and 11.7 percent use e-cigarettes (cited in the first paragraph of the MMWR report).

What this all means is that you shouldn’t take these numbers to the bank. They’re useful, but not guaranteed to be super-accurate.

And now for something completely different: are you curious about how your state is doing in the opioid crisis? The chart below shows the change in death rate from all drug overdoses between 2013 and 2017. In some states, like West Virginia, Ohio, and DC, the death rate doubled or more. In others, like California and Kansas, it was low and didn’t change at all. And finally, there were even two states, Wyoming and Montana, that showed a decrease.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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