Opioid Crisis Versus Other Vices

The media and our politicians have recently made a lot of noise about the horrors of prescription opioid addiction. They quote alarming sounding statistics like 34,000 people in the U.S. died from prescription drug overdoses in 2016. What they fail to do is put the issue in perspective by comparing death rates caused by various other vices in which Americans partake.

Consider this; last year 480,000 Americans died due to smoking tobacco. That’s more than 12 times the number who died taking prescription drugs yet we no longer hear much about government efforts to convince people to stop smoking. The really alarming statistic though is that 41,000 people died from second hand smoke, those folks didn’t have the nasty habit but lived or worked with someone who did and lost their lives because of it. On average smokers die 10 years earlier than non-smokers. About 15% of Americans still smoke but the rate has been falling gradually for the last 50 years.

Smoking tobacco isn’t the only socially acceptable vice that kills more than prescription drugs, obesity or being significantly overweight also kills far more than drug use at a rate of 300,000 Americans per year. While tobacco use has been falling, obesity has been rising for the last 30 years and today nearly 38% of Americans are obese.

Then of course there is the real drug of choice, alcohol, which kills 88,000 Americans every year. Last year more than 10,000 of those deaths were in automobile accidents of which 8,400 were not the drunk driver. Alcohol related deaths are also on the rise with nearly one in seven Americans or 32 million people struggling with a serious alcohol problem last year. That’s more than the population of Texas.

After all those preventable but socially acceptable causes of death we get to opioids. In 2016 more than 20,000 Americans died of overdoes involving prescription opioids. That’s less than one fourth of those from alcohol related causes. It’s half as many as those killed by second hand smoke.

For more than 40 years the country has fought a war on drugs as President Nixon famously labeled it and we still have drug abuse and deaths due to overdoses. We have an entire federal agency and every local police department in the country focusing resources on drug users and their suppliers.

Based on recent history I foresee further tightening of regulations and enforcement making it even harder for people with serious chronic pain like arthritis and fibromyalgia to get the small doses of morphine that make their lives tolerable.

Why do our leaders ignore the positive results of the efforts to get people to stop smoking that have succeeded without recourse to armed officers arresting people on the street? Why do our leaders appear to ignore the far greater scourge of alcohol abuse which has no criminal penalties unless the user is caught driving while intoxicated? Why aren’t we as a nation focusing on the far greater number of deaths and long term health problems caused by obesity? Why is drug use treated more vigorously than other more dangerous vices?

 Published in the Seguin Gazette November 3, 2017