The Rise of the Opioid Epidemic

How did the toxic mix of the war on drugs and a profit-driven medical system get us to a place where overdoses now kill more Americans than gunshots or road accidents?

In the 1990s, researchers at a pharmaceutical company spotted an opportunity. They started pushing the idea that opioid pain medication was actually much less addictive than previously thought. And why were these companies so desperate to convince doctors that they could prescribe far more powerful opioid medications? Because there were billions and billions of dollars to be made. Pharmaceutical Companies started sending sales reps across the US and Canada aggressively marketing much stronger opioid pain medication to doctors.

• After a steady increase in the overall national opioid dispensing rate starting in 2006, the total number of prescriptions dispensed peaked in 2012 at more than 255 million.

• The overall national opioid dispensing rate declined from 2012 to 2020, and in 2020, the dispensing rate had fallen to the lowest in the 15 years.

The data on number of people who have died between 1999 and 2019 due to drug overdose develops a positive correlation with the number of people the drug has been prescribed to, although there are some outliers. The trend line confirms a correlation.

From 2014, the number of deaths started increasing even though the number of prescriptions were decreasing. This could mean that people who used opioids initially might have switched to heroin later.

Medical professionals play a key role in facilitating the proper use of opioids. Prescriber rates for opioids vary widely across different states and counties. The hotspot areas are identified by the darker colors on the maps.

• From 2013 to 2019, California recorded the highest number of opioid prescribers. 82,830 medical professionals prescribed an opioid in California whereas, 1333 of the 1694 prescribers in Wyoming prescribed an opioid.

• Of the total prescribers in each state, more than 75% of them have prescribed an opioid at least once throughout 2013 to 2019.

• A total of 813,955 medical professionals prescribed an opioid from 2013 to 2019.

• California, New York and Texas were consistently the top 3 states in the United States with the highest number of opioid prescribers from 2013 to 2019.

There was the problem. If you hand out hundreds of millions of opioid pills, a lot of people are going to get addicted. Let us have a look at Opioid Distributors and Manufacturers to get more insights.

• Just six companies distributed 76 percent of the pills from 2006 to 2014 — oxycodone and hydrocodone — during this period: McKesson Corp., Walgreens, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS and Walmart.

• The top ten distributors of opioid pills in the US sold over 80 billion pills from 2006 to 2014.

• Three companies manufactured about 85 percent of the opioids: SpecGx, Actavis Pharma and Par Pharmaceutical.

• Another market leader though by no means the only ones at it, were Purdue Pharma, pushing their new pill Oxycontin(Oxycodone). They were wildly successful.

• Hydrocodone has consistently been the most prescribed opioid between 2009 to 2015 followed by, Oxycodone.

• Hydrocodone was prescribed about 11 times more stronger than Morphine which is the most common constituent of pain killer.

Back in 2010, authorities started cracking down on doctors in Florida who had been over-prescribing opioids. So, millions of people who became dependent on these medicines were suddenly cut-off by their doctors. And this is where the true opioid crisis really begins.

Those addicted patients did not just stop needing the drugs because their prescriptions ran out. So, millions of them turned to the black market and started using Heroin since, it was cheaper and easily accessible. Inevitably, some of those users started dying. This is the point where Heroin deaths start to climb.