In the United State the opiate crisis has become an epidemic plaquing our youth and countrymen. Opioids overdose seem to be the worst drug problem in the history of the United States. According to the report published in the British Journal of Pharmacology, in 2014, drug overdose, which is largely driven by opioids, surpassed automobile accidents as the number one cause of accidental death for the first time in the history of the United States [1]. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), from 1999 to 2017, over 700,000 people died from drug overdoses. CDC further estimates that 130 people die from an opioid overdose every day [2]. Everyone working whether at an individual level, County level, State level, or at the National platform are trying to look for solutions to tackle the opioid epidemic.

  Opioid epidemic is not only a public health crisis, but it is also a tremendous financial burden. According to a report issued by Altarum, a “nonprofit health research and consulting institute, “the opioid epidemic’s economic cost in the U.S. from 2001 to 2017 exceeded $1 trillion US dollars.” The report also projected that the opioid crisis would cost the U.S. economy an additional $500 billion by 2020 [3].

References

1. Wilson-Poe AR and Moron JA. “The dynamic interaction between pain and opioid misuse”. British Journal of Pharmacology 175 (2018): 2770-2777.
2. Opioid Overdose. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2018).
3. Recommended Citation. “Weaning drug manufacturers off their pain killers: “Creating an exception to the learned intermediary doctrine in light of the opiod crisis”. Fordham Urban Law Journal 46 (2019): 683-715.
4. Tsai AC., et al. “Stigma as a fundamental hindrance to the United States opioid overdose crisis response”. PLoS Medicine 16 (2019): e1002969.

Citation

Citation: Zehra Surani and Salim Surani. “The Opioid Tsunami: Would the Multi-Prong Approach Work?". Acta Scientific Medical Sciences 4.4 (2020): 01-02.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Zehra Surani and Salim Surani. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.