Opioid Overdose Deaths to ‘grow exponentially’

HOW MANY MORE PLOTS? –

2/2/2022 – As long as the status quo stands, “We will continue to have these kinds of addiction outbreaks in our healthcare system,” said Keith Humphreys, chair of the commission and a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, which financed the commission’s research.

The commission emphasized that while specific vulnerabilities in American regulations accelerated the current problem, there was also evidence the opioid crisis had “got a good chance of spreading globally,” Humphreys added.

“As we show in [the report], Australia has a 15-fold increase in opioid prescribing. England has doubled. Finland has gone up by a factor of seven. Brazil by 465%,” he said.

Provisional data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that during the 12-month period ending in April 2021, more than 100,000 people died in the US of drug overdoses, including more than 75,000 people whose deaths involved opioids.

Opioids, a broad class of drugs including prescription painkillers and illicit drugs such as fentanyl and heroin, are involved in about three-quarters of overdose deaths in the US. The number of overdose deaths involving fentanyl has risen sharply since 2015.