If (when) there is conflict with China, we have about sixty days of prescription drugs, and then we’re going to find out where the supply chain problems are. The 70x increase in U.S. investment in precursor production in China from 2005 to 2021 was a massive own goal.
Personally, this is going to lay more lightly on me than a lot of people my age. I already have an arrangement where I see my doctor bimonthly and there’s slack in my personal prescription supply chain. I am going to lean in on this and I can get a couple months ahead of the game without too much trouble. Then I can ration, which will leave me miserable but still functional, and that would be … four to six months.
A 100% cutoff would not kill me, though I would spend more time contemplating the merit of simply waking up dead. I got crunched pretty good in a car crash thirty years ago and I’ve got a genetic motivation to keep my blood pressure on the low side of normal. Deprived of the good stuff, There’d be some OTC, some supplements, and I’d expand my ice pack collection.
But what about the people who go straight from functional to either dysfunctional or dead? I’m of the age where I have friends with conditions that will bowl them over without their daily ration, some will simply drop in short order, and others will be miserable enough that they may decide to just hit eject.
I am used to dodging bullets and making it up as I go along, that’s been my lot in life since 2007. I’m a skittish, fleet footed browser in a world full of grazers, and they’re going to be perplexed. I don’t know that I have more to add on this topic than this one post, but I’ll continue leaning in on that business of defending the realm, in hopes we can avoid some sort of … discontinuity.