New CDC Numbers Show the Drug War Continues to Make Opioids Deadlier
Jacob Sullum
Reason
August 15th, 2018
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Jacob Sullum
Reason
August 15th, 2018
The CDC's latest estimates of opioid-related fatalities in 2017 show that the war on drugs continues to drive people toward deadlier substances. Based on preliminary estimates, the total number of deaths involving opioids (the blue line below) rose by 8.5 percent last year, from about 45,000 to about 49,000. Yet deaths involving heroin (gray line) and prescription analgesics (yellow) fell by 4 percent and 2 percent, respectively. The increase was due entirely to a 37 percent jump in deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone (orange), a category that nowadays consists mainly of illicit fentanyl and fentanyl analogs. That increase follows even bigger jumps of more than 70 percent in 2015 and more than 100 percent in 2016.
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"The death toll reflects two major factors," writes New York Times health reporter Margot Sanger-Katz. "A growing number of Americans are using opioids, and those drugs are becoming more deadly. Experts who are closely monitoring the epidemic say the second factor most likely explains the bulk of the increased number of overdoses last year." That much seems clear, since in recent years opioid-related deaths have been rising much faster than the number of opioid users.
Between 2010 and 2016, for example, the number of heroin deaths increased roughly eight times as fast as the number of heroin users. To put it another way, heroin was eight times deadlier in 2016 than it was in 2010. The proliferation of fentanyl-fortified heroin is the most obvious explanation. The most recent numbers suggest that such mixtures have been eclipsed by "heroin" that consists entirely of fentanyl (which is much more potent than heroin) or its analogs (which are even more potent).
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