This is the second part of a two-part series by our staff writer.
As reported yesterday, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr isn’t alone in his fight against opioid abuse. Based on a report submitted to President Donald Trump by the White House Commission on Combatting Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, the president has also officially declared the opioid epidemic a national emergency.
The report also illustrated the most updated, most harrowing statistics:
● Every day 142 Americans die from a drug overdose.
● Between 1999 and 2015, more than 560,000 people in this country died due to drug overdoses – this is a death toll larger than the entire population of Atlanta. These staggering numbers have put drug overdoses as the lead cause of death in America, surpassing the combined totals for gun homicides and car crashes. Shockingly enough, sustaining this death toll is the equivalent of experiencing an event like September 11, 2017 every three weeks.
● In 2015, 27 million people reported current use of illegal drugs or abuse of prescriptions drugs.
● Opioids are a prime contributor to our addiction and overdose crisis. In 2015, nearly two-thirds of drug overdoses were linked to opioids like Percocet, OxyContin, heroin and fentanyl. In fact, Americans consume more opioids than any other country in the world. The staggering amount of opioids prescribed in the U.S. in 2015 was enough for every American to be medicated around the clock for three weeks.
The epidemic also has a major impact on economic development. According to Carr, the labor force is shrinking in some part due to opioid use and/or addiction:
● Research shows that the increase in opioid prescriptions from 1999 to 2015 could account for about 20% of the decline in men’s labor force participation (during the same period) as well as 25% of the decline in women’s labor force participation.
● Nearly half of prime age men (ages 25-54) who are not in the labor force take pain medication on a daily basis. Two-thirds of those men take prescription pain medication on a daily basis.
Georgia’s attorney general says that, looking ahead, drug overdoses are expected to remain the leading cause of death for Americans under 50, as synthetic opioids — primarily fentanyl and its analogues — continue to push the death count higher. Drug deaths involving fentanyl more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, accompanied by an upturn in deaths involving cocaine and methamphetamine. Together, these drugs are killing people at a faster rate than the H.I.V. epidemic at its peak.
Carr said the rise of opioid use was best explained in the book “Dreamland” by Sam Quiones.
“It can be traced to a single study conducted by a doctor at the Boston University School of Medicine that bore the title, “Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics.”
“The use of opioids began to rise,” says Carr, “and with that came the rise of cheaper forms of the drugs.”
The number of opioid prescriptions dispensed by doctors steadily increased from 112 million prescriptions in 1992 to a peak of 282 million in 2012, according to the market research firm IMS Health. The number of prescriptions dispensed has since declined, falling to 236 million in 2016.Opioids are drugs formulated to replicate the pain reducing properties of opium. They include both legal painkillers like morphine, oxycodone, or hydrocodone prescribed by doctors for acute or chronic pain, as well as illegal drugs like heroin or illicitly made fentanyl.
The report also stated that people who become dependent on pain pills may switch to heroin because it is less expensive than prescription drugs. The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that half of young people who inject heroin turned to the street drug after abusing prescription painkillers, also that three in four new heroin users start out using prescription drugs.
By the way, a second meeting of the attorney general’s statewide opioid task force will be scheduled in the near future. Georgians can keep up-to-date on it by visiting law.ga.gov
