The American crackdown on the drugs that kicked off the modern opioid overdose epidemic—prescription opioids—largely succeeded. The effort to prevent overdose deaths, however, has failed
The effort to prevent overdose deaths, however, is an abject failure. Annual opioid overdose deaths more than tripled between 2010 and 2020, according to. Drug overdose deaths over a 12-month period surpassed 100,000 for the first time in April 2021, with about 75% of those deaths involving opioids.
Many factors contributed to this, but the fundamental problem is that the evolution of the drug market outpaced efforts to stop drug overdoses. “The prices of these drugs have never been cheaper. And the potency of these drugs has never been higher,” says Dr. Daniel Ciccarone, a professor who researches the opioid crisis at the University of California-San Francisco.
If prescription pills were the first wave of the opioid epidemic, the second wave started in the late 2000s, amid growing awareness of the risks posed by prescription opioids, according to Ciccarone. As states and the federal government implemented programs like, health care workers rapidly reduced the number of opioid prescriptions they issued in order to protect their patients—and their medical licenses.
Many people continue to be left behind, he says: “There are a lot of abandoned people who were on pain medications, who cannot get access to adequate pain management anymore, and are therefore, increasingly, turning to the street. We hear those stories every day.” In the late 2010s, however, the U.S. appeared to reach a turning point: overdose deaths seemed to level off nationally, even declining in states such as
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