Opioid Deaths Continue to Rise

  This Washington Post article received national attention. Opioid deaths continue to rise — in 2015 the number of opioid caused deaths were greater than gun homicides. All drug overdose deaths reached approximately 50,000. Around 7200 American soldiers have died in the Middle East since 2002 — over 50,000 Americans died from drug overdose in 2015.

Heroin overdoses have exceeded 12000 deaths in a year. I heard over the weekend that addiction treatment is the fundamental answer, yet most addicts can’t access treatment, and if they can it’s usually low quality treatment. Young people attending college have not gravitated toward addiction treatment as a career. Many think that addiction treatment is subsumed under their psychology degree, or counselor’s license, but addiction treatment is a specialty that requires specialized training and knowledge. Drug misuse that doesn’t reach the severity of addiction can be dealt with in one on one counseling sessions dealing with risk reduction and cognitive behavioral changes, but opiate addiction, for instance, requires a comprehensive medical approach along with group therapy and individual counseling.

I’m sure there are individuals who can get off opiates through their church, their physician, talking with a therapist, or going directly to Narcotics Anonymous, but when setting standards we need to be realistic. Most opiate addicts will not get through the withdrawals — even if they tough it out and do get past the withdrawals, statistics show they’ll return to opiate use in a very short time.

According to scientists who’ve studied opiate addiction’s effects on the brain, opiate addiction rewires the brain, so to speak (for technical knowledge read the book linked) or causes dysfunction in the brain at the reward center, the mesolimbic pathway. It takes a long time for the brain to adjust after coming off opiates. If we’re going to treat opiate addiction effectively, we need standards that are comprehensive. There must also be access to treatment. I don’t how we can fund treatment to assure everyone receives quality treatment, but it’s the only way to effectively deal with the problem. Physicians can quit giving out so many pain-killers, and scientists can invent pain medication that’s not addictive, but even then there’ll be underground drug operations which understand the profit in addiction. Opium has been a problem for a long, long time with spikes and dips in the severity of use — there’s a spike right now.