(Bloomberg Opinion) — Since 1999, when the unconstrained prescription of painkillers was beginning to emerge as a public-health crisis, more than 535,000 lives have been lost to opioid overdoses.
(Bloomberg Opinion) — Since 1999, when the unconstrained prescription of painkillers was beginning to emerge as a public-health crisis, more than 535,000 lives have been lost to opioid overdoses. If that grim number seems familiar, it’s just a bit higher than Covid-19’s toll of 527,000 deaths so far. Covid-19 and the opioid crisis are linked in other ways, too. The pandemic has driven an alarming increase in overdose fatalities over the past year, as people struggling to recover from opioid dependence have been undone by isolation, job loss and the added difficulty of getting support and treatment with social-distancing rules in effect. All this at a time when lethal illicit fentanyl is increasingly turning up in street narcotics, including counterfeit hydrocodone and oxycodone pills. The 12 months ending last July saw 61,000 deaths, a surge from the previous year — even though the period includes only the first five months of the pandemic. To its credit, Congress has set aside billions of dollars in stimulus spending to address mental health and substance-use disorders. But health providers say still more is needed — particularly since states have slashed their budgets for addiction treatment amid the pandemic. Policy makers at all levels of government need to wake up to this emergency and redouble efforts to tackle the problem. It remains essential to continue to discourage doctors from overprescribing pharmaceutical opioids — a years-long campaign that has led to a 40% drop from the 2011 peak.
