Rhetorical Analysis Of The Other Opioid Crisis

When looking at a scholarly journal or other form of report pertaining to controlled substances, the theme is usually pretty clear; “drugs are bad, people that do drugs are bad, and it’s only getting worse.” Moore challenges this theme by breaking the mold in his article, “The Other Opioid Crisis” by implementing several rhetorical devices to add a more human aspect to the not so black-and-white issue. (Summary goes here) The article starts out with the story of a woman named Lauren Deluca. In this story, Moore details her struggle with pancreatitis, eventually leading to the fact that she was prescribed an opioid as a last resort. However, the language in the story is so powerful it almost makes the reader feel the same pains through the screen. Words and phrases such as “searing abdominal pain” and “acute attacks” were only part of what made the anecdote so powerful. In this opening few paragraphs, he also includes Deluca’s personal description of her experience dealing with pancreatitis. She goes on to say “It was like the scene in Alien,” referring to the scene in the 1979 sci-fi horror film scene where an extraterrestrial creature erupts from a space traveler's abdomen, which most certainly puts into perspective just

Shocking numbers such as the 200,000 people that have died from opioid overdoses were only amplified when broken down further to show that 46,000 of those deaths happened in 2016. Then he glosses over the temporary solution that has been enacted in which federal and state governments are restricting access to opioids, only to condemn it. He states that “The new policies are choking off access to the medications for some of the 87.5 million chronic-pain patients who take them according to their prescriptions and don't misuse them,” and then quickly relates it back to Deluca’s story, drawing out the reader’s