The upcoming presidential election has heightened awareness of many political topics, from the Israel-Hamas war to climate to abortion laws. Although these are important issues, it’s time to bring more national attention to the opioid crisis.
The reality is that more people die from drug overdoses than car accidents. Even more startling is that, on average, someone dies from a fentanyl overdose in the United States every seven minutes.
Opiates are compounds extracted from the poppy plant, but the term opioid also includes other compounds that interact with the brain’s opioid receptors. Heroin, morphine, fentanyl and oxycodone are only a few examples. Often prescribed for their strong pain killing effects, opioids can become addictive in only a few days. Up to 25% of people receiving long term medical treatment with these drugs develop a dependence.
In 1999, less than 10,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses, and since then the number has gradually increased. In 2019, opioid-related deaths approached 50,000. Only a few years later, this number skyrocketed: an estimated 81,806 Americans died in 2022 alone from opioid overdoses.
The crisis has come in three waves, with the first wave being triggered by the legal prescription of drugs such as OxyContin. The second wave involves heroin, and the third and most recent wave consists primarily of fentanyl and other illegal synthetic opioids.
Election Day is rapidly approaching, and responsible voters need to bear in mind how the opioid crisis is being dealt with on a national level. While both parties agree on the severity of the epidemic, the problem of how to solve it has become more of a partisan issue.
An analysis of state legislators’ social media posts about opioids found that Democrats were generally more focused on holding pharmaceutical companies accountable, in addition to improving the treatment and recovery process. Republicans generally held the illegal drug trade across borders responsible for the epidemic.
Pharmaceutical companies, along with the FDA’s failure, were one of the first causes of the increase in opioid-related deaths. When the FDA approved Purdue Pharma’s extended-release oxycodone in 1995, the company profited billions of dollars. Opioids were recklessly being used for common conditions like lower back pain. Other companies followed suit, using inappropriate marketing strategies — including exaggerating benefits and minimizing risks — for profit.
Although pharmaceutical companies can be blamed for the beginning of the epidemic, it’s now 2024. We are in the third wave of the crisis.
Today, illegal opioids, particularly fentanyl, are responsible for the vast majority of overdose deaths rather than prescription drugs. In 2022, an estimated 14,716 Americans died from prescription opioid overdoses, but there were 73,838 reported deaths from non-prescription synthetic opioids in the same year.
Thus, pharmaceutical companies are just one of many culprits responsible for the crisis. Another contributing factor is the lack of patrol at the southern border.
Most opioids that enter the country come from the southwest border, so tightening security is crucial to reducing smuggling of illicit drugs. Unfortunately, failures by both the Trump-Pence and Biden-Harris administrations have allowed these illegal substances to enter America in shocking quantities.
In 2017, former president Trump promised to add 5,000 Border Patrol agents. One year later, less than 150 agents had been hired. Additionally, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has approximately 4,000 less people in employment since the Biden-Harris administration took office in 2020.
Agents estimate that only 5-10% of drugs from Mexico are being seized by authorities, considering the difficulty in screening the more than 219,000 vehicles that enter the country from the border each day.
Greater pressure needs to be put on our government to secure the southern border. Although former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris both announced plans to strengthen Border Patrol if elected, the facts and history speak for themselves.
The opioid epidemic is not going to fix itself, and if we keep letting our government make empty promises, tens of thousands of people will continue dying each year.
Fortunately, there are steps that have been taken to solve the crisis on the state level. Signed in 2017, the Strengthen Opioid Misuse Prevention Act aims to limit the number of days a prescription opioid can be used and reduce the number of unused pills in homes. The Heroin and Opioid Prevention and Enforcement Act of 2018 also addresses several concerns related to opioids in the country.
Although these acts have helped move us in a more positive direction, the crisis is still ongoing, and there are steps that we should be taking, as students, with the potential to save thousands of lives each year.
Education is a critical step, whether that be in the classroom, workplace or household. Staying informed about the dangers of opioids, in addition to understanding prevention strategies and treatment methods, is crucial to solving this crisis. Importantly, community members and first responders must be educated on how to administer Narcan, a drug that has proven to effectively reverse an opioid overdose.
We also have to hold our government accountable. This can come in many forms, whether that looks like contacting representatives directly, attending community gatherings or even organizing our own events.
Awareness for the opioid crisis is the biggest step we can take to push our community and government into action. If we want to save a life — to potentially save someone every seven minutes — we cannot remain idle.
