Almost One in Ten Americans Suffer from an Addiction: An Analysis of Numbers
One of the biggest struggles our country currently faces is the sweeping drug and alcohol addiction epidemic. As cataclysmic events go, this one has been relatively underreported by the media. That is concerning in its own right. But when Americans learn the real statistics abounding drug and alcohol addiction and substance abuse in general, we really see the threat levels of this crisis.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, one in ten Americans over the age of twelve struggles with a drug or alcohol problem. In a country of over three-hundred million Americans, that translates to about twenty-five million Americans who are hooked on something. Furthermore, only about twenty-five percent of them ever actually get treatment for their addictions. This is a problem, a health epidemic, and a socioeconomic crisis all wrapped into one.
Statistics on Addiction in the United States
The sheer statistics on drug abuse and alcoholism in the United States are pretty staggering. Here are some of the more prevalent statistics:
- As mentioned above, twenty-five million Americans are addicted to drugs and alcohol. But that does not take into account the number of people who are affected by addiction even if they are not directly consuming those substances. Every addict has several people to whom they are close, family members, loved ones, etc. In reality, there are another eighty to one-hundred million Americans who are severely hurt by a loved one’s substance abuse.
- Drug and alcohol abuse takes a toll on the nation’s economy too. The National Institutes of Health estimate that drug and alcohol abuse problems cost the U.S. about four-hundred billion dollars a year in lost workforce productivity, additional medical expenses, collateral damage, crime prevention, theft, family difficulties, deaths, etc.
- Drug and alcohol abuse poses a risk to everyone. This is no longer just an inner-city, impoverished-demographics problem like it used to be. Now, everyone is at risk. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the people most at risk are whites, Native Americans, men, singles, people between the ages of eighteen and fifty, middle-class income families, and people with lower educational backgrounds.
- Drug overdose deaths are perhaps the most concerning statistic of them all. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no less than sixty-four thousand Americans lost their lives to substance abuse problems in 2016. That was the highest death toll from drug use ever recorded. The impact was so severe in fact that it set the U.S. life expectancy back several tenths of a year. More than forty thousand people died in 2015, and more than thirty thousand lost their lives in 2014. Numbers for 2017 have not been published yet.
- Opiates have been the largest contributor to the 21st-century addiction epidemic, with legal pharmaceutical drugs being by far the most prevalent. Over twelve million Americans are hooked on the very drugs that are supposed to “help” them. As such individuals are addicted to drugs that are legal, totally accepted, and in fact recommended, it becomes very difficult to get people off of these substances.
Resolving an Addiction Epidemic
The above numbers are shocking, but they are not unshakable. People can overcome substance abuse, even if it takes them a considerable amount of effort. Going forward, we need to focus on rehabilitating those who are hooked on substances and preventing others who are not yet hooked from falling in with addiction. When we combine prevention and rehabilitation, we stand the best chance of removing a substance abuse crisis in any given area. We need to apply this strategy on a nationwide level.
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