In 2017, more than 72,000 people in the US died of opioid overdoses, eclipsing 2016’s 64,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s preliminary data.
The US has scrambled to try to get a handle on the widespread misuse of both prescription painkillers and illicit street drugs like heroin and fentanyl.
Congress has passed a slew of bills related to the highly addictive drugs, but the Senate has not taken them up yet and despite President Trump’s declaration of pubic health emergency, no additional funding has been allocated to the cause.
Rising overdose death rates are fueled primarily by powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl which many turn to after building tolerance to prescription drugs and heroin.
The opioid crisis continues to account for more than 1.5 percent of American deaths – more than the one percent killed in the Vietnam War in 1968.
Opioid overdose deaths continue to climb across the US, according to the CDC’s preliminary data. Some states saw improvements (blue) but in Nebraska, the death toll rose by a third
Meanwhile, doctors in the US continue to write just as many opioid prescriptions as they have for the last several years.
Epidemics tend to follow similar patterns – whether they are are epidemics of communicable diseases, like the flu, or those spread by ‘social contagion’, like addiction.
That model would predict that we are have passed the peak of the opioid crisis – but the latest numbers suggest otherwise.
The prowess of medicine in the US keeps most disease outbreaks in check, but has failed to slow the spread of an addiction and overdose crisis. The US has the highest overdose death rate of any country in the world.
Every day in 2016, 116 Americans died of opioid-related causes.
And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) latest estimates suggests that there were more such fatalities daily in 2017.
Though not all of the data is final, the agency reports that there was a 6.6 percent increase opioid overdoses.
No corner of the US has been untouched by the opioid epidemic, but some regions of the country, like West Virginia and the Appalachian region have been hit particularly hard.
In that state, the CDC estimates that more than 1,000 people died in 2017 alone.
While its total death toll of 152 in 2017 was relatively low, Nebraska saw that greatest increase in opioid overdose deaths of any state, with fatalities rising by a third over 2016.
The latest data does offer some cause for hope, however. In thirteen states, including Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma, Vermont, New Mexico and Wyoming, overdose deaths declined from 2016 to 2017.
The 21st Century Cures Act, passed under former President Barack Obama in 2016 distributed $4.8 billion in opioid-related grants across the nation in April 2018.
States have claimed that they have intensified their prescription drug monitoring programs, but a study published earlier this month revealed a disheartening stagnation over the last 10 years.
Its findings suggest that doctors are prescribing just as many addictive drugs to patients today as they were in 2008, long before widespread addiction was declared an emergency.
In the last year, several states as well as high-profile individuals have filed lawsuits against Purdue Pharma, which makes the blockbuster painkiller OxyContin.
Fentanyl has proven the most deadly drug, but public health experts maintain that most opioid addictions begin with prescription painkillers.