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Friday, May 27, 2016

In Denial About America’s Opioid Painkiller Problem? This Map Might Change Your Mind

If you think the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is being alarmist byurging primary care physicians to stop prescribing so many opioid painkillers, or that the fact that 10% of doctors are writing more than 50% of the prescriptions for opioids is not a concrete indicator of a problem, then perhaps this map of overdose deaths in the U.S. will help to drive the point home.

Or rather, it’s two maps, put together by The Guardian using CDC data on overdose death rates in 1999 and 2014.

The fact is that drug overdoses now outnumber car crashes in terms of fatalities in the U.S., with 80 people dying every day just from opioid overdose. Yet two decades ago, drug deaths weren’t even on the radar for most Americans.

As you can see from the 1999 map, overdose deaths were rare in much of the country, with the exception of some high mortality rates in parts of Appalachia, the Southwest, and Northern California. Though even then, you could see the potential for explosion in OD deaths in the Pacific Northwest, New England, Florida, Oklahoma, and the Midwest.

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

All of this is a by-product of the Afghanistan Poppy War.
The US Government won.
It's intelligence agencies have made a fortune off of selling the spoils of that dirty war.
Big Pharma set up the citizens, and then intelligence sold them heroin.
Then the system armed its police (like military) and sic-ed them on the citizens who were hooked.
Loads of money has been made in the private for-profit prison "industry".

Wake up folks. Get yourself off of drugs (of all kinds).

Anonymous said...

Lots of physicians won't even touch the prescribing of opioids, leaving that to pain management specialists. States and feds are coming down hard on doctors in specialties other than pain management and also look at those doctors with a microscope.

Anonymous said...

703 pain management doesn't prescribe much either. Mostly do shots and implants. That's why their are so many people doing heroin now for pain and getting hooked. People don't understand huge difference of a pill chemically designed to help pain vs snorting or injecting heroin.

Anonymous said...

Its how the cia is funded. Afgan was about herion & poppy not oil or 911

Anonymous said...

Since you're going there, don't forget Ronald Reagan and the "crack" the CIA sold to the gangs in LA to fund buying weapons. That was an Ollie North idea. But he was an awesome President right?