Deaths from cocaine are flat, while fatal overdoses of methamphetamines are up. Slightly declining are deaths from prescription opioids (oxycodone, hydrocodone and oxycontin), and from heroin. For the past few months, the drug overdose death rate has shown signs of coming down from the 2017 spike. Deaths from narcotic overdoses passed 70,000 in 2017, that’s almost 200 drug overdose deaths a day, and abuse of prescription painkillers remains a leading cause.īut here’s what passes for “good news” on drug overdose deaths CDC statistics suggest that 2017 may have been the peak year of the epidemic. Seven years later the epidemic has not been stopped. Frieden repeated, “but it can be stopped.” No ranking officer at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), or the Justice Department, no one from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (the Drug Czar), or National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), or the Food and Drug Administration had said much of anything about the over-prescription of opioid painkillers, even though they had killed 15,000 Americans in 2010. Frieden was the first federal official to make an honest report on the problem. In retrospect, the really shocking news was that Dr. Thomas Frieden, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) held a news conference to announce what he called, “the shocking news … that we are in the middle of an epidemic of prescription drug overdose.”
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