Efforts to fight the epidemic must focus on more than just the availability of certain drugs, the researchers say.
The current opioid overdose crisis is actually part of a 40-year trend that is still headed upward, and current efforts to fight it may not be anywhere near enough, researchers said Thursday.
A new analysis of drug overdose deaths shows that while the drug of choice may change, and the kinds of people affected may change, the trend is clear: The number of Americans dying of drug overdoses has gone up exponentially for decades.
It started before the availability of synthetic opioids, and may have only a little to do with the prescribing habits of doctors or the pushy habits of drugmakers, the team at the University of Pittsburgh found.
“The opioid crisis may be part of a larger, longer-term process,” the team wrote in their report, published in the journal Science.
“The epidemic of drug overdoses in the United States has been inexorably tracking along an exponential growth curve since at least 1979, well before the surge in opioid prescribing in the mid-1990s.”
The Health and Human Services Department released $1 billion this week to various agencies to use in fighting the epidemic, with funds earmarked for medications to help people stop using opioids and behavioral programs to help prevent relapses.
HHS said the number of opioid prescriptions has already dropped by 21 percent since January 2017.
But if the conclusions of the Pitt team are right, the epidemic will continue to worsen.
“If we try to address the opioid epidemic, we can probably make a difference for a while,” Dr. Donald Burke, dean of Pitt’s school of public health, told NBC News.
But there are several underlying factors in the ongoing epidemic, many of which have nothing to do with the drugs that are available, said Burke, who led the study team.
Burke predicts that new drugs and new routes of taking them will hit the streets, keeping the epidemic going. These include societal and cultural factors.
“This is a reason that U.S. society needs to pay attention to the loss of the sense of purpose, the widening economic disparities, the loss of community,” said Burke.
Nearly 48,000 people died from opioid overdoses in 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said Thursday that he wants to raise awareness of opioid addiction as a brain disease.
Opioids are still overprescribed by doctors, CDC says
July 7, 201702:53
The CDC has blamed doctors, in part, for prescribing opioids too freely for inappropriate reasons, and has urged Americans to treat their pain in less dangerous ways, including the use of analgesics such as ibuprofen, as well as with ice and stretching.
CDC data also shows that the introduction of unapproved synthetic drugs made to resemble fentanyl doubled death rates from overdoses from 2015 to 2016.
Death rates among younger adults have risen so much that they have reduced the overall life expectancy for the U.S. population as a whole.
But no one drug is to blame, Burke and his colleagues found.
They traced back nearly 600,000 deaths starting in 1979 from each individual drug or drug class, including heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and prescription painkillers.
Put on a graph, they all went up over time, but not in any coherent way.
Deaths were also seen in different communities.
“At first, the highest death rates were in the coastal big cities,” Burke said.
“Then that pattern changed to where the higher rates of death are no longer in the big cities. They are in the smaller towns and Appalachia,” he added. “The drugs and the locations and the demographics have changed.”
The team added all the deaths together and graphed them again.
“You take all these year-to-year death rates and plop them on a logarithmic scale, it is a perfect straight line,” Burke said. Death rates doubled about every nine years, the graph showed.
“This remarkably smooth, long-term epidemic growth pattern really caught our attention,” Burke added. “If we can figure it out, we should be able to bend that curve downward.”
The findings jibe with what suicide experts have been saying — that many Americans are feeling increasingly disconnected and hopeless, which in turn is helping drive an increase in suicides.
Burke said it’s important to look at all the causes of drug overdoses. “I am not trying to shift blame anywhere,” he said.
“We need to do both: pay attention to the drugs that are causing the problem today, but at the same time, address the longer-term concerns.”
Filed under: General Problems
Dang, these boys are really in a rut… They can’t see their hand in front of their face anymore.
Amén!
Why does this article care or quote what the CDC says?? Have they become some secret mafia authority in the United States that all must surrender to? It is clear the most dangerous thing in America right now is journalists, pharmacists, physicians & the medical staff as a whole that doesn’t understand or have the knowledge of the laws of this land or Constitutional knowledge to already KNOW that the CDC has ZERO, NONE, ZILCH, NADA, NO Constitutional or lawful authority to make & enforce any recommendations on opioid prescribing or laws! Yet the entire country has gone mad & listening to a center that literally has NO Constitutionally bound or lawful authority to tell anyone or any doctor what to do, how to do it & how to be a doctor. ONLY the FDA has that authority & Constitutional authority & the FDA (the ONLY governoring authority on opioid prescribing) has NO limits on opioid prescribing for pallative care & chronic pain! The CDC has been allowed to infiltrate our society, right down to even journalists that reprint what they recommend, but never once declaring that they have no Constitutional authority on it by law! We are a country of laws for a reason! Doctors are allowing a non-Constitutional based w/zero authority or lawful authority to scare them & make unlawful recommendations on opioid prescribing for chronic conditions & pallative care. It’s to their own ignorance they follow the CDC, instead of the FDA. Soon doctors will face class action lawsuits for using an unconstitutional based & not set in law guidelines to treat people in pain w/real serious debilitating conditions instead of doing so lawfully under the Constitution via the FDA. The opioid hysteria must stop & the CDC is a death squad for any human suffering w/chronic conditions. The fact they think Ibuprofen is adequate to treat bone cancer, RA, ALS, renal disease, rare bladder diseases, etc. just further proves they are in fact a death squad, hellbent on infiltrating society to kill off & force suicide on elderly, Vets, disabled people & anyone suffering w/chronic, incurable illness & they do it all w/out having a single authority over our nation or its’ laws. Not a single one or governoring authority whatsoever in America. There are no words for what is happening & no one wants to use facts or even the Constitution anymore. Laws no longer matter, the CDC does. God help you if you ever suffer from a real illness. The medical community has given over their brains & knowing America’s laws on prescibing medications to a center that doesn’t even matter & has no authority whatsoever in America. They worked for their medical degree all to not use it in the end & let the some random unlawful center dictate how they treat disease & chronic illness, right down to what to prescibe & how to prescibe it & how & when they need to see their own patient they know personally & the CDC has never met. GOD HELP US! …RIP all those who have already committed suicide for this travesty & those that continue to suffer due to the CDC’s recommendations that are completely irrelevant & unlawful & not even Constitutionally bound. May God have as much mercy on the CDC & those that erroneously use it as authority, as they did on chronic pain sufferers, cancer & disease ridden individuals, which happens to be the majority of Americans.