Opioid Deaths Do Not Correlate with Pain Pill Abuse or Addiction Rates

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Self Will Run Riot? –

August 21, 2019 – In 2017, just 30 percent of opioid-related deaths involved prescription analgesics, and the records compiled by the CDC indicate that 68 percent of those cases also involved heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, or alcohol. The role of drug mixtures is probably even bigger than those records suggest. In New York City, which has one of the country’s most thorough systems for reporting drug-related deaths, 97 percent of them involve more than one substance.

The evidence does not favor a simple narrative in which more opioid prescriptions led to more abuse and addiction, which in turn led to more deaths. The “opioid crisis,” which seems to be part of a long-term upward trend in drug-related deaths that began in 1979, might more accurately be described as a problem of increasingly reckless polydrug use, a problem that cannot be solved—and may be worsened—by demanding wholesale reductions in pain pill prescriptions.