Perspectives: While Congress Sleeps, The Opioid Crisis Continues To Get Worse
Editorial writers weigh in on the nation's opioid epidemic.
The Washington Post:
Congress Isn’t Doing Enough To Stop Opioid Abuse
Approximately 60,000 people died from non-methadone opioid overdoses in the United States last year, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If you squint at the CDC statistics very hard, you can barely make out a positive trend: the growth in deaths attributable to heroin and common forms of prescription opioids seems to have slowed between 2015 and 2017. However, that smidgen of progress was more than offset by a wave of death from synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, which killed 29,406 people in 2017 — up from roughly 3,000 in 2013. (9/22)
Stat:
Why There's An Overdose Epidemic — In Two Graphs
The “overdose epidemic” that so many Americans are talking about isn’t really a single epidemic. It’s actually several of them, something we began exploring when we graphed the yearly counts of overdose deaths for the last 40 years.It turns out that, when totaled, these sub-epidemics trace a nearly perfect exponential growth curve. For four decades, overdose deaths have been growing, doubling about every eight years. (Hawre Jalal and Donald S. Burke, 9/20)
The Hill:
Effective Regulation Of The Addiction Treatment Industry Will Take Education And Collaboration
With the opioid epidemic continuing to plague America, it's never been more important to help those suffering from addiction find quality and trusted treatment options. Addiction is a complex medical issue that requires clinical treatment to address both the disease of addiction and co-occurring mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder. (Michael Cartwright, 9/21)
