The Drug Abuse Epidemic
How did we get here?
The Opioid Crisis: “How Did we Get here?”
By Avery Kalafatas, Founder of Project 1 Life
“Tacking the 50%”: A look into the normalization of Teen Substance Abuse.
By Annabella Bernhardt, Project 1 Life Ambassador
The Rise of Prescription Drug Abuse
The incidence of drug abuse has grown exponentially in the US over the past two decades, with a notable surge during the COVID pandemic. Some assert that Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of Oxycontin, played an instrumental role in starting and then fanning the opioid abuse crisis. Court records and countless articles point to Purdue’s aggressive and misleading approach to marketing the efficacy and (so claimed) non-addictive nature of the drug. But it’s not just aggressive pharma companies that are to blame for the current opioid crisis. We must also consider the insurance industry, as an example. Insurers seemed all too happy to continue to fund a growing number of per capita pain medication prescriptions, with escalating doses per patient over time. Further, we must also look to our communities for failing to educate people on the perils of opioid abuse…. and failing to effectively support those who became addicted to the very drugs that were supposed to ease their pain.
Source: New York Times
Legal Changes
Thankfully, lawmakers began to take note of the growing number of opioid overdoes. Massachusetts was the first state to act, passing legislation in 2016 to restrict the number of opioid prescriptions that doctors could issue. Other states followed suit and, as of January 2022, 38 states have enacted legislation to restrict opioid supply. This is of course good news, but we sadly cannot ignore the laws of supply and demand. Reducing the supply of legal prescription opioid doses in the market did nothing to mitigate users’ demand for the product. Enter the illegal drug trade and cartels…..
Rx Reduction —> More Street Drug Use
As doctors started limiting their opioid prescriptions, many users turned to other sources of supply. Some resorted to using heroin. Others paid large sums for opioid pills on the black market. Enterprising cartels and drug dealers began manufacturing fake prescription pills to satisfy the growing demand, developing sophisticated operations to manufacture fake pills that closely resembled their prescription counterparts on the outside (but not on the inside). Dealers started incorporating Fentanyl into these pills because Fentanyl is cheap, readily available, and hyper addictive. As described elsewhere on this site, one of the many perils of this ingredient is its potency. The difference between a therapeutic and deadly dose of Fentanyl is minuscule to the eye. Furthermore, Fentanyl tends to clump together when mixed with binding ingredients such that one fake pill may have a deadly dose of Fentanyl in it while others from the same batch will have no Fentanyl at all.
Dangers Today
Despite the government’s efforts to reduce opioid abuse, we now face an epidemic of epic proportions. Drug overdose deaths now materially outnumber deaths from car accidents or gunfire (New York Times). Teens and young adults have been particularly hard hit. Joe Friedman, a public health researcher at UCLA and co-author of a recent JAMA study, noted that fatal overdoses among adolescents increased 94% from 2019 to 2020 and a further 20% from 2020 to 2021. Importantly, the increased death rate is not reflective of an increase in the number of teens abusing drugs (substance abuse actually declined moderately over this time period). Friedman and his colleagues point to the increased prevalence of Fentanyl as the reason for the surge in teen overdose deaths, noting that 77% of teen overdose deaths in 2021 involved Fentanyl.