Explaining the issues: The Opioid Crisis

The world of Hollywood often characterizes drug addiction as dirty and wrong, something that is only seen among the homeless and in the poorest communities in our country. Yet the film and television industry often fails to acknowledge the reason behind the problem of drug, and particularly opioid, addiction.

Opioids are a highly addictive class of drugs that include heroin, which is illegal, synthetic opioids like fentanyl and also prescription pain medications like oxycodone, hydrocodone, morphine and others. Since most of these medications are legal, why are so many people dying from them?

It all began in the 1990s. The pharmaceutical companies who developed and produced these drugs stated that patients using these medications as pain relievers would not become addicted to them. As a result, doctors and clinicians began prescribing opioids for pain management at high rates. With the increased rate of prescription came higher rates of misuse and overdose rates began to rise. In 2017, the United States Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 760,000 people have died from a drug overdose since 1999. In recent years, ⅔ of drug overdoses reported involved an opioid. One of the main reasons behind this statistic is that 21-29% of patients prescribed opioids misuse them and 8-12% of that group develop an opioid addiction disorder. However, opioid misuse rates in high school students have dropped significantly since the data began being tracked, indicating that opioid overdose rates may drop in the future.

Opioid addiction has also caused the spread of other diseases. With the rise in use of injection drugs, HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C have also spread through needle sharing.

The Opioid Crisis also has social and economic impacts on our communities. The National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Center for Disease Control estimates that about $78.5 billion a year is spent on prescription opioid misuse. This number includes healthcare costs, lost productivity at work, addiction treatment and criminal justice involvement. The crisis has a “substantial economic burden on society” according to a research article written in the Forensic Pain Medicine Section of the Journal of the American Academy of Pain Medicine. But the social impact of this crisis goes beyond the hospital. Most people believe that medication prescribed to them by their doctor will definitely be safe. This is driven by pharmaceutical companies pushing physicians to prescribe opioids excessively to make more money. Women who abuse opioids during pregnancy often forgo prenatal care in the fear that their doctor will find out about their addiction. This can lead to a variety of problems with the most serious being Neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), where newborns experience withdrawal symptoms at birth. Children who live with parents who have Substance Use Disorder often have unstable and sometimes dangerous home lives, with their parents being 3x more likely to physically or sexually abuse them.

With all these disturbing statistics, what exactly is being done to help stop this crisis? One of the main governmental initiatives has been HHS’s 5-point Opioid Strategy, introduced in 2017. In the Strategy, the HHS aims to improve access to treatment and recovery options for those with an opioid addiction, to support more timely reporting of data about opioid overdoses, to bring attention to and support other pain-management techniques, to increase the availability of overdose-reversing drugs and to support research on pain and addiction.