The things we leave out

My Sun column today is about the billions in settlements that Baltimore and other jurisdictions — cities, counties, whole states — are in the process of receiving from pharmaceutical companies, pharmacy chains and distributors for their roles in the horrible opioid epidemic.

Municipalities compute the costs of responding to overdoses, treating the addicted and dealing with the criminality that developed with a whole new wave of heroin and fentanyl addicts. I get into other, hard-to-measure consequences: What scale do we use to weigh all the pain inflicted on generations of Baltimoreans by heroin, cocaine, crack and, in more recent years, fentanyl? Even as lawyers for the city negotiate and win large settlements from the drug producers that caused the opioid epidemic, there are costs impossible to measure, going back decades.

I have always been moved by the late Robert F. Kennedy’s March 1968 speech on the things we leave out when computing the Gross National Product, now the GDP:

“Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product … does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

You can read the entire speech here, and undertaking well worth your time.