The US is in the grip of a dire drug crisis. In 2017 drug overdoses caused the deaths of some 70,000 people, with opioids being the main driver of this staggering statistic. So grave is the crisis that Americans are now more likely to die from an accidental opioid overdose than from a car crash.
The situation is unprecedented not only in the context of US history, but also in relation to other countries. A new study has found that America experiences more drug-related deaths than any other wealthy nation.
Published in the journal Population and Development Review, this study was carried out by Jessica Ho, an assistant professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California. Data from the Human Mortality Database and the World Health Organisation Mortality Database was used to analyse rates of drug overdose deaths in 18 countries between 2003 and 2013. She found that overdose death rates in the US are 3.5 times higher, on average, than those of the other 17 countries.
The rates are nearly two times higher than in countries with the next highest numbers of drug overdose deaths – specifically “Anglophone” countries like Canada, the UK and Australia, and Scandinavian countries. Drug overdose mortality in America is an alarming 27 times higher than in Italy and Japan, which have the lowest rates of the countries analysed.
The number of drug overdose deaths in the US is impacting the country’s life expectancy, which has been steadily dropping due to the opioid crisis. By 2013, drug overdoses contributed to 12 per cent of the male life expectancy gap between the US and other wealthy countries and 8pc of the life expectancy gap among women.
“On average, Americans are living 2.6 fewer years than people in other high-income countries,” Ho explains. “This puts the USA more than a decade behind the life expectancy levels achieved by other high-income countries. American drug overdose deaths are widening this already significant gap and causing us to fall even further behind our peer countries.”
This wasn’t always so. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the US was not an outlier in terms of drug overdose deaths, and Nordic countries were experiencing the highest rates among wealthy nations. But several factors – including false reassurances by pharmaceutical companies that opioids are not addictive, which in turn led to their over prescription as painkillers – have driven the current epidemic.
As efforts to decrease opioid prescriptions have taken hold, addicted patients have turned to heroin and, more recently, fentanyl, a synthetic drug even more deadly than prescription pills and heroin.
In other countries, by contrast, opioid prescriptions have been tightly controlled. In Japan, for instance, doctors are required to undergo extensive training before they can prescribe opioids for non-cancer related pain. In France, Italy and Portugal patients must be registered before they can receive opioid medications.
Ho notes in her study that significant increases in opioid-related deaths have been documented in Australia and Canada, where opioid consumption has also increased. While not as dramatic as the situation in the US, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden and the UK are witnessing higher rates of opioid prescribing in recent years.
Seems to me some ‘cold turkey’ is urgently required.
Gordon is the former president and chief executive of BMMI. He can be reached at gordonboyle@hotmail.com