The opioid epidemic appears to be hurting white Americans more than any other group.
The rise in fatal drug overdoses is almost entirely responsible for the growth in mortality rates for white, non-Hispanic people between the ages of 22 and 56 in recent years, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Mortality rates for that population rose by 21.2 deaths per 100,000 people between 1999 and 2015, the study found. If drug mortality rates had stayed at 1999 levels, mortality rates would have actually declined for men in that population considerably and risen only slightly for women.
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Recent analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that recent increases in drug overdose deaths “are driven by continued sharp increases in deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, such as illicitly manufactured fentanyl.”
And all races have shown an increase in opioid-related deaths, the CDC found. “No area of the United States is exempt from this epidemic—we all know a friend, family member, or loved one devastated by opioids,” CDC principal deputy director Anne Schuchat said in a statement.
From 2015 to 2016, opioid-involved deaths increased among men, women, people above the age of 15, whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asian/Pacific Islanders, the CDC said. “The largest relative rate change occurred among blacks (56.1%),” it added.
Of the estimated 50,000 Americans who died of drug overdoses in 2015, some 63% involved opioids. That same year, more than 33,000 Americans died of drug overdoses involving opioids, according to a report from The Council of Economic Advisers, an agency that is part of the Executive Office of the President. That’s more than quadruple the rate of overdose deaths involving opioids in 1999, according to the CDC.
President Donald Trump has declared the opioid epidemic “a public health emergency.” It has ravaged some communities across the country. But it isn’t just killing people who have become addicted to these powerful pain medications, it’s taking a financial toll too.
Some of the areas seeing the most overdose deaths are southwest and northeast Ohio, eastern Kentucky, western West Virginia and western Pennsylvania, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Some estimates put the nationwide cost at $500 billion
The economic cost of the opioid crisis in 2015 was $504 billion, much higher than previous estimates, according to a report from The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).
When taking health-care bills, criminal justice costs and lost productivity, the opioid epidemic is costing Americans billions of dollars a year. “Nobody has seen anything like what is going on now,” Trump said in a speech in October. “As Americans, we cannot allow this to continue. It is time to liberate our communities from this scourge of drug addiction.”
Opioids are killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. They include prescription pills (including Vicodin and Oxycontin), as well as heroin and fentanyl, a drug that can be injected or taken through a skin patch or as a lozenge.
One city is looking for pay back. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city is seeking about $500 million in a lawsuit against opioid manufacturers and distributors, to recover some costs New York has suffered as a result of opioid abuse.
Opioids have put a financial burden on the city, increasing the use of drug treatment services, inpatient hospital services, medical examiner costs, criminal justice costs, and law enforcement costs, city officials said. Those costs include about 45,000 emergency-room visits for opioid patients in 2017, and delivering naloxone, an antidote for overdoses.
An analysis by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, published in the journal Medical Care in 2016, estimated the cost of treating overdoses, abuse and dependence on prescription opioids alone costs American society some $78.5 billion per year.
It crunched data from 2013, when some 2 million Americans met the criteria for prescription opioid abuse and dependence, and some 16,000 died from prescription opioid overdoses. To put that figure in context, the U.S. spent $79.9 billion on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that same year, the researchers said.
But the new analysis from CEA is higher because it goes beyond “conventional methods” to account for the value of lives lost, the authors of the report said. Plus, since the previous studies, the opioid crisis has worsened and caused more deaths.
Even before the CEA’s analysis, the estimated costs of the crisis were staggering. Patients with untreated opioid use disorders tend to incur $18,000 more in health-care costs annually than those without such a disorder, according to a 2011 study in the American Journal of Pharmacy Benefits.
Hospitals
One study from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston found that the average cost of treating an opioid overdose victim in intensive care units jumped 58% between 2009 and 2015. As the addiction persists, patients arrive in a worse condition and require longer stays. In 2015, average cost among 162 academic hospitals was $92,400 per patient in intensive care.
Criminal justice
The U.S. spent nearly $8 billion on criminal justice-related costs due to selling and consuming opioids, which was almost entirely a cost to state and local governments, according to the 2015 National Center for Injury Prevention and Control study published in the journal Medical Care. Worse, the recidivism rate for drug addicts is around 45% within three years of prison release.
Businesses
The cost in lost productivity is about $20 billion, the 2015 study found. Some seven in 10 employers have felt some effect of prescription drug usage among their employees, including absenteeism or decreased job performance, according to the National Safety Council, a nonprofit based in Illinois. And fatal overdoses cost nearly $22 billion in health care and lost productivity costs.
Unseen costs
Of course, these are just the costs researchers can actually measure, said Curtis Florence, one of the authors of the study published in Medical Care. It doesn’t even begin to touch the impact on quality of life or pain endured by those affected. As Trump said Thursday: “No part of our society, not young or old, rich or poor, urban or rural, has been spared this plague of drug addiction.”
The best place to start in alleviating the opioid crisis would be for the CIA to curtail its stranglehold on importation of illicit drugs. Fat chance they’re backoff that gold mine.
Stop all foreign entanglements, prosecute those responsible.
Every time we occupy a country that produces heroin we end up with an opioid epidemic. Occupy a country(or load it with advisers) that produces cocaine and we get a cocaine(crack) epidemic. Its almost as if its somehow related. Go figure. Solution? Another war.
“Opioids Are Showing Up in Mussels in the Pacific Northwest”
https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/wjbxb9/mussels-oxycodone-opioids-puget-sound-pacific-northwest
And that is not all found there: “Sadly, this isn’t unique to mussels. In 2016, researchers tested juvenile chinook salmon pulled from the Puget Sound and found “a medicine chest” of drugs in their systems, including Prozac, Advil, Benadryl, Lipitor, Flonase, Aleve, Tylenol, Paxil, Valium, Zoloft, Tagamet, OxyContin, Darvon, nicotine, caffeine, Cipro, and cocaine. (An environmental toxicologist who worked on this study said not to worry—people typically don’t eat these migratory chinook.)”
Up until the time of my heart attack 3 years ago and my abdominal aortic aneurysm surgery a year later, the only time I ever had opiates is when I had my wisdom teeth removed and for a kidney stone. This despite easy access and the ability to write Rx’s for it. I believed the biochemistry lesson that taught when you take exogenous opioids, you impair your natural endorphin production.
I feel empathy for those who become habituated/addicted. For two days waiting for my kidney stone to pass, I found out how an addicts think. EVERY second of the day, I knew where my pill bottle was. NO Way was I going to not going to have it on the ready. A second stone a few years later found me in the ER begging for morphine. It passed in the ER. They gave me a script for percodan but I threw it away as the pain was gone.
In 34 years of prescribing pain meds, I came to believe most who become reliant on opiates do so out of emotional pain as much as physical pain. Only people who deny or are oblivious to the emotional component of pain, think they are medicating physical pain. Opiates supply a sense of well being and OBTUNDS pain. And by gosh, they know they are entitled to their medicine…!!! If they don’t get from you, they will get it from the myriad of pill mills fostered by big pharma. Greedy professionals grow many addicts.
Once flying high and feeling good on pharmaceuticals, normal life is a drag. Especially if your natural pain killer production factory is shut down from pill popping behaviors. I personally believe those susceptible to addiction lack in natural production of endorphins. They are at the far left of the bell curve in endorphin production. Or they become dependent from following doctors’ orders. Yes, this is just a rule of thumb and exceptions abound. No way would I deny someone legitimate pain relief. Better a few habituated than many denied. Only things are definitely out of hand.
An apparent ethical dilemma is if you have a client/patient who is dependent/addicted on opiates, and they have surgery/root canal/abscess it is correct to supply them additional and higher strength pain meds; this if you accept their state as chronically using opiates. Yes, maybe point them to treatment but to deny them relief is cruel – in a medical form of logic. And this too is known and abused. I cannot count the times clients called or came to me with a rotten tooth/painful condition, wanting meds. I would offer to remove the offending tooth for no charge but none ever took me up on the offer. They only wanted drugs. It happens most often on a nice sunny day in the spring…
Many self inflict self harm to get meds. I have seen physicians confess this. While in the Professional Enhancement Program
http://www.pinegrovetreatment.com/pep.html
almost every physician enrolled (forced to attend is more like it) had abused meds.
For prescribers it is sometimes difficult to determine when you are being played. My motto was better for me to be scammed than to deny legitimate pain relief. I gave most people one free pass, friends and family included, and then it is too bad for you.
I lament the epidemic occurring and know there is no easy solution. Beyond obvious conditions indicating medications for pain, the answer is a spiritual/psychological one. Education rather than advertisements and promotions by the big pharm.
They are killing themselves because the only alternative basically leads to the killing of others. No peaceful outcome exists. Cowards.
Makes me wonder if all this marxism and 3rd world immigration is being done simply to suppress the white man to the point he is wrecked by drugs and either dead or being fed on by the medical racket which profits handsomely not just from the drugs themselves but from the OD treatments. What a disgusting world. It was simpler and more honorable back when opposing groups just battled each other in the open field. Now we just play these stupid games and pretend we’re civilized because no blood is being spilled. There is nothing civilized about this.
Kill all the middle aged working white males with alcohol, drugs and despair. Best plan to save Social Secuirty evah.
The Libertarians have the solution to this, legalize all drugs.
Once a drug is legalized and anyone can use as much as they want with no legal restraints it no longer causes problems.
Anon,I actually agree.We get rid of the drug/police/cop/court cartels and drugs so cheap not too much in way of related crime in comparison to now.Try and help those you know with any addiction problem but remember in the end up to the person whether they want to live or die,all one can do is open doors to meetings/therapy/try and just talk to em to help keep their sobriety.I will say through personal experiance in the past with friends and now a family member there is only so much one can do beyond watching one you care about die and then must keep moving on with your own life.As I like to say,I can shoot a horse in the head and drag it to water but I can’t make it drink!
Opioids have a legit place in pain care/management but like so many things in life was not meant to be a permanent solution,folks have a right to kill themselves,just do not make me pay for it.
This raises the uncomfortable question: what do all the anti-drug LEOs, etc. then do? To eliminate interdiction means dismantling half of our multi-billion-dollar police/court/prison enterprise (to say nothing of the CIA element), and sending half those people home.. to do what? Tend a garden? Raise beef cattle?
Dream on.
They can scope out and round up illegals and welfare scammers. $10 billion a year spent hiring people to do this could save 10 times that much money and create 100k+ jobs.
Eugenics in action….
Make it all legal and free ! Register as an addict surrender your drivers license and all fire arms and recieve as much as often as you want ! Till death do us part !
Think of the savings in law enforcement prisons courts welfare and SSI healthcare wow a shit load of government employees could get $15 bucks an hour scooping up bodies and incinerating them now that’s a real drug problem fix and a budget fix “WIN WIN”
Nothing’s free, someone has to pay for it.
Oh we are paying for it and giving away lethal doses to as many miscreants that want it is an ultimate savings
Louis Farrakhan says it is the CIA plotting to get rid of the white devils.
It’s just not the pills, etc that’s killing us, it’s loss of moral fiber and failure to recognize we are spiritual beings. If a person doesn’t address their spiritual nature with goodness and mercy, the world will offer what ever it takes to kill our soul. It comes down to a matter of choice and support from another person who can love the least, the last and the lost nature within all of us. John
My meditations of last night brought me back to this thread. I mentioned I felt like an addict when I had a kidney stone. I went to the ER for it. I received a second shot of opiate when the first dose did not touch the pain. I was sent home with a bottle of pills. I recall I knew where the pill bottle was every second. If I had to engage with activity or people, no way would that be more important than having very quick access to the bottle of pain relief. It controlled my thinking and actions.
I have known many addicts/alcoholics, many in good recovery from their affliction. My first wife was an addict. She had told me she once had a problem with opiates when she was a teenager. I thought, good, she knows better now. How naive I was. We dated for 6 months and for the first year of our marriage I only saw her smoke one single joint, with me as we vacationed. How little did I understand the disease process addicts suffer.
For 8 years I endured endless dancing to the tune of recovery, therapist after therapist, and Alanon and open AA meeting galore. I had a small patient base who were in recovery based on my participation in recovery issues. I listened in person to the Army nurse who did the intervention on Betty Ford. I read numerous books on the subject. I attended many seminars on recovery. Decades after my divorce from her and I was hospitalized with mental issues/PTSD. While in a facility in Tallahassee I had a visit from the head nurse of FSU’s nursing school. She was a family friend. She comforted me by saying many spouses of addicts/alcoholics end up with clinical mental issues because of being susceptible to gaslighting by the identified addict. I would agree with the premise based on relationships with tons of AA/NA/SLA people.
As I said, my dependance on my pill bottle was overruling other normal actions. One explanation of drug dependence states that our reptile brain (brain stem and cerebellum) takes over control of the neocortex/cerebral hemispheres. It does so as instinctual pathways override cognitive processes. Drugs becomes the king of motives.
Addicts/alcoholics are called cunning, baffling and powerful. This I can attest. I have a fairly high iq. I know I would lose any discussion/intervention attempt with the addicts I have been intimate with. It boils down to emotional arguments, you think liberalism is a disease/mental illness. I agree. So is addiction.
Their deceit to keep their secret becomes normalized. Anything that threatens the reptile brain’s demand for drugs will be defeated, by hook or crook. No lie is too big to deny if it fosters more, more more. And by then the drugs are required to just feel normal, not to be in detoxification mode. eg Lying in bed kicking with involuntary twitches and nausea.
I exercised some of those traits with my habitual zipper malfunctions. Cheating on significant others is a symptom. Rationalizations abound, I will spare you details.
Today my tolerance for randomness needs no pill nor pussy to medicate/eradicate my feelings. I do not have much tolerance for manipulations of viper brain controlled people. I have learned to detach with love from those who engage in emotional skullduggery and complete corruption of thought to support their use of meds/drugs to ameliorate their pain and suffering. Certain conditions do negate this stance. It is a fine line that separates the differences.
So take this away from my missive. Have compassion for the afflicted. Jails, institutions and death is the price of addiction. Beware of the trap of compulsion stemming from a snake under the grass, a few feet above your ass.
And some you cannot save as they do not want to be saved. hat tip to Project Pat and the ballad of Russel Rushhaven aka Don’t Save Her. The intro is sufficient to get the idea. The rest of the song is near unintelligible but the message is clear, even to a hard of hearing honky.