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Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever


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Drug Deaths in America Are Rising Faster Than Ever

 

AKRON, Ohio — Drug overdose deaths in 2016 most likely exceeded 59,000, the largest annual jump ever recorded in the United States, according to preliminary data compiled by The New York Times.

 

The death count is the latest consequence of an escalating public health crisis: opioid addiction, now made more deadly by an influx of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and similar drugs. Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death among Americans under 50.

 

Although the data is preliminary, the Times’s best estimate is that deaths rose 19 percent over the 52,404 recorded in 2015. And all evidence suggests the problem has continued to worsen in 2017.

 

The initial data points to large increases in drug overdose deaths in states along the East Coast, particularly Maryland, Florida, Pennsylvania and Maine. In Ohio, which filed a lawsuit last week accusing five drug companies of abetting the opioid epidemic, we estimate overdose deaths increased by more than 25 percent in 2016.

 

In 2016, Summit County had 312 drug deaths, according to Gary Guenther, the county medical examiner’s chief investigator — a 46 percent increase from 2015 and more than triple the 99 cases that went through the medical examiner’s office just two years before. There were so many last year, Mr. Guenther said, that on three separate occasions the county had to request refrigerated trailers to store the bodies because they’d run out of space in the morgue.

 

This exponential growth in overdose deaths in 2016 didn't extend to all parts of the country. In some states in the western half of the U.S., our data suggests deaths may have leveled off or even declined. According to Dr. Dan Ciccarone, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and an expert in heroin use in the United States, this geographic variation may reflect a historical divide in the nation’s heroin market between the powdered heroin generally found east of the Mississippi River and the Mexican black tar heroin found to the west.
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QUOTE (Tex @ Jun 7, 2017 -> 09:25 AM)
People gotta die somehow. I wonder how many of these are assisted suicides?

 

I would guess less than a percent.

 

Addiction is complicated and terrible, very many of these victims would certainly not want to be overdosing. A good many more may have gotten addicted via a pain killer prescription that sent them down a spiral. I have addiction throughout my family, and I'm terrified of getting back problems. People deserve more respect than "gotta die somehow".

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QUOTE (Tex @ Jun 7, 2017 -> 09:25 AM)
People gotta die somehow. I wonder how many of these are assisted suicides?

 

Check out the graphs in the article. Many counties are seeing huge, huge spikes year over year. It's attributable to the opiods now on the street being tens of hundreds of times more potent. A lot of people feel the pharmaceutical companies that pushed opiod painkillers on tehse populations bear a lot of the responsibility as well.

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QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 7, 2017 -> 09:36 AM)
I would guess less than a percent.

 

Addiction is complicated and terrible, very many of these victims would certainly not want to be overdosing. A good many more may have gotten addicted via a pain killer prescription that sent them down a spiral. I have addiction throughout my family, and I'm terrified of getting back problems. People deserve more respect than "gotta die somehow".

 

I remember thinking how weird it was several years back when a few of my little brother's more distant friends or friends-of-friends were being hospitalized or dying from heroin OD's. That was unheard of when I was in the same high school only a four years ahead of him, and suburban Chicago isn't exactly the epicenter of the crisis.

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QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 7, 2017 -> 10:01 AM)
I remember thinking how weird it was several years back when a few of my little brother's more distant friends or friends-of-friends were being hospitalized or dying from heroin OD's. That was unheard of when I was in the same high school only a four years ahead of him, and suburban Chicago isn't exactly the epicenter of the crisis.

 

Would have been insane to hear of a classmate doing heroin when I was in high school, but was considered much more through the lens of using it with needles. Heroin was always the scariest due to addiction, but also the rather vulgar way of using it. I do wonder if it moving to pill form has removed a "scare" barrier that has led to kids trying it more.

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QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 7, 2017 -> 10:06 AM)
Would have been insane to hear of a classmate doing heroin when I was in high school, but was considered much more through the lens of using it with needles. Heroin was always the scariest due to addiction, but also the rather vulgar way of using it. I do wonder if it moving to pill form has removed a "scare" barrier that has led to kids trying it more.

 

When I was in school coke was the rich kids drug, and the poor kids smoked pot. Heroin wasn't even a blip on the radar.

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QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 7, 2017 -> 10:07 AM)
When I was in school coke was the rich kids drug, and the poor kids smoked pot. Heroin wasn't even a blip on the radar.

 

There were certainly kids taking painkillers though to get high, stuff like vicadin. Makes the jump more coherent, but evenso, still surprising. Both of those seem rather social, and opiods seem the opposite.

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Not sure what time you guys are talking about, but back in the late 90s people were doing heroin in HS. It was a small subset, but things like Ketamine/Heroin were definitely around.

 

Heroin is something that I have always told anyone I know never to try. Just not worth it, and from what I hear its not even a fun drug. It would be nice of the US government would change its drug policies so that kids could actually understand what drugs are really "dangerous" and what drugs are not.

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It's not necessarily spiking due to kids in HS or college deciding to try heroin on a whim. A big part was the surge of opiod prescriptions being given out to people, turning on a steady stream of painkillers that was suddenly cut off in the last few years. People have instead turned to street drugs, and fentynal and carfentinal are substantially more potent than "regular" heroin.

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QUOTE (raBBit @ Jun 7, 2017 -> 04:15 PM)
Man Naperville alone should be freaking the state out. A friend from Naperville said they call i88 Heroin Highway.

 

There was a WBEZ report 2 years ago called heroin highway specifically around Neuqua Valley, which had just seen some obscene number like 5 or 6 overdose deaths in a class.

 

Part of it was a mom whose daughter had overdosed looking back and realizing that she had been at the movies with her daughter and friends, and they'd sit in a separate row. Later found out they were doing heroin, basically next to her.

 

Hard listen.

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QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 7, 2017 -> 04:24 PM)
There was a WBEZ report 2 years ago called heroin highway specifically around Neuqua Valley, which had just seen some obscene number like 5 or 6 overdose deaths in a class.

 

Part of it was a mom whose daughter had overdosed looking back and realizing that she had been at the movies with her daughter and friends, and they'd sit in a separate row. Later found out they were doing heroin, basically next to her.

 

Hard listen.

 

PBS has done some great stuff on this topic as well.

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QUOTE (raBBit @ Jun 7, 2017 -> 04:32 PM)
That's disturbing.

 

The pizza hut by my parent's house had to cops called because a women nodded off while her three young kids ran around the restaurant.

 

This s*** I can't handle.

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QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 7, 2017 -> 04:24 PM)
There was a WBEZ report 2 years ago called heroin highway specifically around Neuqua Valley, which had just seen some obscene number like 5 or 6 overdose deaths in a class.

 

Part of it was a mom whose daughter had overdosed looking back and realizing that she had been at the movies with her daughter and friends, and they'd sit in a separate row. Later found out they were doing heroin, basically next to her.

 

Hard listen.

They drive down 88 to 290, stop off on the west side, score and drive back all f***ed up. It happens all day every day.

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But we have great solutions!! Many more housed in private prisons...and,

 

The newest version of 'Trumpcare' may have some alarming implications for the opioid crisis

http://www.businessinsider.com/cbo-score-a...d-crisis-2017-5

 

 

Christine Eibner, a health economist for the Rand Corporation, said that while there was a lot of uncertainty about how states would change regulations, it was reasonable to think state legislators would be under a lot of pressure to cut back on so-called essential health benefits, or certain conditions that insurers are required to cover, if other states are able to show that doing so brings down premiums. If that happens, substance-abuse treatment is viewed as the benefit "most at risk" to be cut, Eibner told Business Insider.

 

Approximately 1.84 million people in the US are receiving treatment for substance-use disorders or mental illnesses through the Medicaid expansion or the ACA's individual insurance marketplace, according to research conducted by Richard Frank, a professor of health economics at Harvard Medical School, and Sherry Glied, a dean at New York University. All of those people would be at risk of losing the approximately $5.5 billion paid out for treatment through those two avenues of insurance.

 

A 2017 Health and Human Services report found that approximately 34% of individual-market insurance plans did not cover substance-abuse treatment before the Affordable Care Act. Under the AHCA, a similar number would most likely either not cover treatment or begin underwriting substance-use disorder as a preexisting condition for thousands of dollars in premium surcharges, making insurance prohibitively expensive, Frank told Business Insider.

 

Eibner said the individual market wasn't the only place where treatment coverage would be affected. While she said employer-sponsored insurance would most likely continue to cover treatment, she expected Medicaid programs in states rolling back regulations related to the essential health benefits to cut substance-abuse treatment coverage as well.

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Sounds like a humanitarian crisis if ever there was one...

 

He who oppresses the poor taunts his Maker, But he who is gracious to the needy honors Him.

 

I was naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.'

 

But whoever has the world's goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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