9781422282519

13 CHAPTER ONE: OPIATES AND OPIOIDS

OPIOIDS BY THE NUMBERS

devoted his entire 2014 State of the State Address to what he said was a “full-blown heroin” crisis in Vermont. “In every corner of our state, heroin and opiate drug addiction threatens us,” he said. “The time has come for us to stop quietly averting our eyes.” According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, an estimated 49 million people around the world misused opioids in 2012, the last year such numbers were available. In the United States, 2.1 million people suffer from a variety of medical disorders related to prescription opioid misuse. One of the reasons for these staggering figures has been the burgeoning number of opioid prescriptions written by doctors since the early 1990s. In 1996, for example, U.S. doctors wrote enough OxyContin prescriptions to generate $48 million in sales—a modest figure. By 2002, however, sales for the drug hit $1.5 billion, and by 2010, sales reached $3.1 billion. The According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, as of 2015: • Opioid addiction occurs among all social and economic classes. • Every single day, 46 Americans die from prescription opioid overdoses; that’s roughly two deaths an hour, or nearly 17,000 each year. • About 8,000 people die annually from overdosing on heroin. • About three-quarters of those who misuse opioid painkillers eventually turn to heroin, because it is cheap to buy. • One in 20 high school seniors has taken Vicodin. • One in 30 high school seniors has misused OxyContin. Source : American Society of Addiction Medicine, “Opioid Addiction Disease, 2015 Facts & Figures.” http://www.asam.org/docs/default-source/advocacy/opioid- addiction-disease-facts-figures.pdf.