Drug Overdose is More Deadly Than HIV/AIDS, Guns, and Car Crashes!
More than 64,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year, according to the first government report to include all recorded drug deaths from 2016. That’s up 22% from the roughly 52,000 overdose deaths in 2015. That’s higher than the more than 38,000 people who died in car crashes, more than the 36,000 who died from gun violence, and more than the 43,000 who died due to HIV/AIDS during that epidemic’s peak in 1995.
The current 64,070 count may even turn out to be a bit low. The numbers for last year are still provisional since the cause of death in some cases remains under investigation. This latest drug epidemic, however, is not solely about illegal drugs. It began, in fact, with a legal drug.
Back in the 1990s, doctors were persuaded to treat pain as a serious medical issue. There’s a good reason for that: About one in three Americans report suffering from chronic pain, according to a 2011 report from the Institute of Medicine.
Pharmaceutical companies took advantage of this concern. Through a large marketing campaign, they got doctors to prescribe products like OxyContin and Percocet in droves—even though the evidence for opioids treating long-term, chronic pain is very weak, while the evidence that opioids cause harm in the long term is very strong.
So, painkillers proliferated, landing in the hands of not just patients, but also teens rummaging through their parents’ medicine cabinets, other family members and friends of patients, and the black market. As a result, opioid overdose deaths trended up—sometimes involving opioids alone, other times involving drugs like alcohol and benzodiazepines. By 2015, opioid overdose deaths totaled more than 33,000—nearly two-thirds of all drug overdose deaths.
Seeing the rise in opioid misuse and deaths, officials have cracked down on prescriptions painkillers. Law enforcement, for instance, threatens doctors with incarceration and the loss of their medical licenses if they prescribed the drugs unscrupulously.
Not all painkiller users have abused street opioids, and not all opioid users started with painkillers. But statistics suggest many did: A 2015 analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that people who are addicted to prescription painkillers are 40 times more likely to be addicted to heroin. So, other types of non-prescription opioid overdoses also rose. That doesn’t mean cracking down on painkillers was a mistake. It appeared to slow the rise in painkiller deaths, and it may have prevented doctors from prescribing the drugs to new generations of people with drug use disorders. But the likely solution is to get opioid users into treatment. According to 2014 federal data, at least 89% of people who met the definition for a drug use disorder didn’t get treatment. That must change—workable solutions to drug addiction do exist, and they don’t require replacing one drug for another.
The Narconon Arrowhead Program uses a drug-free, withdrawal system to help a person to gradiently come off drugs, then utilizes vitamins, healthy food, light exercise and time in a sauna to draw out the residual effects and reduce cravings. Then the last step of the Program provides a series of life skill training that helps a person better deal with challenges they will face in life and handle problems without turning to drugs to solve them.
