The US Opioid Crisis, Charts Galore
How many hospital admissions, deaths and addicted babies does it require before the government empowers their federal health agencies to intervene?
The US accounts for 4.4% of our 7.1 billion global population, and consumes nearly 90 percent of the world’s opiate supply.
As we all know by now, this situation spread like pill popping wildfire, and is completely out of hand. Drug overdoses have dramatically increased over the last two decades, with deaths more than tripling between 1999 and 2016. In 2008 overdose was declared the number one cause of accidental death in the states. This is killing more Americans than gun violence and car crashes combined.
In 2016, more than 63,000 people died from drug overdose, approximately 42,249 or 67% involved prescription or illicit opioids.
Synthetic opioids account for the highest number of deaths and belong to the novel psychoactive substances (NPS) drug category. These are man made and similar in action to the naturally occurring opiates, morphine and heroin. They are derived from species of the opium poppy plant and have been used for medicinal and recreational purposes for centuries.
Fentanyl is the most popular synthetic opioid. Fatal overdoses doubled in 2017, to over 19,000. Unlike many other synthetic opioids, fentanyl is available for prescription use. Licensed in the 60’s, it was administered during surgery. Clinical use expanded in the 90’s, when a prolonged-release skin patch was developed for chronic pain.
Fentanyl is estimated, dose for dose, to be 75 times stronger than morphine and is now common in the illicit drugs market. The opioid is reportedly used as a highly dangerous lacing agent of heroin and cocaine.
Associated Complications of Opioid Addiction
There are a host of associated side effects, illnesses and complications, which go hand in hand with opiate abuse. This includes opioid use disorder, hepatitis, HIV and neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS).
Nearly six out of every 1,000 infants born in the US are now diagnosed with NAS. This number has quadrupled in the last 15 years. The number of effected babies between 1999–2016, in Tennessee alone:-