Tag: opioids

The Shady Statistics Behind the War on Painkillers

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://reason.com/video/2023/10/11/the-shady-statistics-behind-the-war-on-painkillers/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

The attack on opioid prescriptions for non-cancer chronic pain began to advance around 2010, and intensified thereafter. The crackdown coincided with—and perhaps caused—a rapid growth in heroin overdose deaths, and later, an explosion in illegal synthetic opioid deaths, primarily fentanyl, an illicitly manufactured substance added to or substituted for heroin to meet the increasing demand for illegal opiates. This pattern of events is illustrated in a graphic put out by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Indeed, overdose deaths from commonly prescribed opiates increased rapidly from 1999 to 2010, but the chart doesn’t tell us how many of the victims legally obtained the opiates. The chosen scale also omits the fact that drug overdose deaths have been increasing at a fairly steady rate since 1979, with no obvious changes associated with the rise and fall of opioid prescriptions for chronic pain. The chart does show how overdose death rates from commonly prescribed opiates did not decline much after 2010, although legal prescriptions went down dramatically. This suggests that these deaths may have involved individuals who bought illegally manufactured opiates, or that the people who lost pain medication as a result of official actions were not the ones liable to overdose.

The increase in deaths of despair obviously merits some policy attention, but labeling it an “opioid crisis,” as is common nowadays, profoundly misstates its nature, timing, and likely causes and solutions. To justify restricting opioids for non-cancer chronic pain patients requires specific evidence that people prescribed opioids for pain are the ones dying of overdoses. There’s quite a bit of negative evidence on this score, but public health officials have seized on a few positive studies to support their claims.

One influential and heavily cited 2011 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Association Between Opioid Prescribing Patterns and Opioid Overdose-Related Deaths,” uses a classic prohibitionist tactic. The authors use a sample of 750 Veterans Health Administration (VHA) patients who received opioid prescriptions for pain and later died of opioid overdoses, and compare them to a random sample of 155,000 other VHA patients who received opioid prescriptions and did not die of overdoses.

Author(s): Aaron Brown

Publication Date: 11 Oct 2023

Publication Site: Reason

$50 Billion in Opioid Settlement Cash Is on the Way. We’re Tracking How It’s Spent.

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/opioid-drugmakers-settlement-funds-50-billion-dollars-khn-investigation-payback/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

More than $50 billion in settlement funds is being delivered to thousands of state and local governments from companies accused of flooding their communities with opioid painkillers that have left millions addicted or dead.

….

Most of the settlements stipulate that states must spend at least 85% of the money they will receive over the next 15 years on addiction treatment and prevention. But defining those concepts depends on stakeholders’ views — and state politics. To some, it might mean opening more treatment sites. To others, buying police cruisers.

….

What’s more, many states are not being transparent about where the funds are going and who will benefit. An investigation by KHN and Christine Minhee, founder of OpioidSettlementTracker.com, concluded only 12 states have committed to detailed public reporting of all their spending.

The analysis involved scouring hundreds of legal documents, laws, and public statements to determine how each state is divvying up its settlement money among state agencies, city and county governments, and councils that oversee dedicated trusts. The next step was to determine the level and detail of public reporting required. The finding: Few states promise to report in ways that are accessible to the average person, and many are silent on the issue of transparency altogether.

More than $3 billion has gone out to state and local governments so far. KHN will be following how that cash — and the billions set to arrive in coming years — is used.

Author(s): Aneri Pattani

Publication Date: 30 March 2023

Publication Site: Kaiser Health News

Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm

Graphic:

Excerpt:

This data visualization presents provisional counts for drug overdose deaths based on a current flow of mortality data in the National Vital Statistics System. Counts for the most recent final annual data are provided for comparison. National provisional counts include deaths occurring within the 50 states and the District of Columbia as of the date specified and may not include all deaths that occurred during a given time period. Provisional counts are often incomplete and causes of death may be pending investigation (see Technical notes) resulting in an underestimate relative to final counts. To address this, methods were developed to adjust provisional counts for reporting delays by generating a set of predicted provisional counts (see Technical notes).

Author(s): Ahmad FB, Rossen LM, Sutton P

Publication Date: accessed 5 Feb 2022

Publication Site: CDC

Opioids and the Unattached Male

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.city-journal.org/opioids-and-the-unattached-male

Graphic:

Excerpt:

From 2010 to 2019, the drug-related death rate among never-married prime-age white men increased some 125 percent: from 52 deaths per 100,000 to 117 (including 2020 would show an even steeper rise, but the pandemic affected Census data collection). If single and divorced prime-age white men had seen opioid deaths rise by only the same rate as those deaths rose among their married counterparts, the U.S. would have seen 38,800 fewer deaths from drug-related causes over the past decade just among this demographic group.

A marriage certificate is no prophylactic against the scourge of drug overdoses, of course. Marital status is correlated with income, race, and age; while death certificates don’t report income, we know that married decedents are more likely to be white, older, and better-educated. Controlling for those factors still shows single men to be at greater risk of dying from drug-related causes than married ones.

Author(s): Patrick T. Brown

Publication Date: 14 Jan 2022

Publication Site: City Journal

County-level data on U.S. opioid distributions, demographics, healthcare supply, and healthcare access

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352340921000639

Graphic:

Excerpt:

The dataset summarized in this article is a combination of several of U.S. federal data resources for the years 2006-2013, containing county-level variables for opioid pill volumes, demographics (e.g. age, race, ethnicity, income), insurance coverage, healthcare demand (e.g. inpatient and outpatient service utilization), healthcare infrastructure (e.g. number of hospital beds or hospices), and the supply of various types of healthcare providers (e.g. medical doctors, specialists, dentists, or nurse practitioners). We also include indicators for states which permitted opioid prescribing by nurse practitioners. This dataset was originally created to assist researchers in identifying which factors predict per capita opioid pill volume (PCPV) in a county, whether early state Medicaid expansions increased PCPV, and PCPV’s association with opioid-related mortality. Missing data were imputed using regression analysis and hot deck imputation. Non-imputed values are also reported.

Taken together, our data provide a new level of precision that may be leveraged by scholars, policymakers, or data journalists who are interested in studying the opioid epidemic. Researchers may use this dataset to identify patterns in opioid distribution over time and characteristics of counties or states which were disproportionately impacted by the epidemic. These data may also be joined with other sources to facilitate studies on the relationships between opioid pill volume and a wide variety of health, economic, and social outcomes.

Author(s): Kevin N. Griffith, Yevgeniy Feyman, Samantha G. Auty, Erika L. Crable, Timothy W. Levengood

Publication Date: April 2021

Publication Site: Data in Brief