Opioid Statistics
How did this Crisis Start?
Opioids were not always seen as harmful and addictive. In the 90s, specifically the late 90s, prescription drug companies assured the medical community that people would not get addicted to opioids and pain relievers. Hospitals, doctors, and other healthcare providers began to prescribe them often, in high doses, and in large quantities. This led to people misusing opioids, forced to live with addiciton.
General Statistics
26 percent of patients prescribed opioids for chronic pain misuse them.
10 percent develop an opioid use disorder, which means people depend on opioids to function throughout their daily lives.
80 percent of people who use heroin misused prescription opioids beforehand.
Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid (80 times more potent than morphine)
Opioid Trends
This is a graph showing the amount of people who overdosed on opioids in Colorado from 1999 to 2018. From this graph, you can see that in 1999, which was when the opioid crisis began, the number of prescribed opioid increased over 100%.
Synthetic Opioids
Synthetic opioids are the deadliest type of opioids, the most common one being fentanyl. The reason it has become so popular is because illegally-made fentanyl is very cheap for street dealers to cut their product with it. Many overdoses that happen are due the user being clueless that fentanyl is present in the drug they are taking. Nonpharmaceutical Fentanyl was responsible for over 31,000 deaths in 2018 in the United States alone.
Who's affected?
Prescription drug abuse is most common in young adults. In fact, 12% of people ages 18 to 25 have taken them for a non-medical reason. Younger people are more likely to experiment with drugs. They may try a painkiller to get high or take a stimulant to boost their studying.
This chart shows trends of drug use by age group.