More than 47,000 people died last year from drugs, higher than during any previous year on record, said the report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
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“The increasing number of deaths from opioid overdose is alarming”, said CDC Director Tom Frieden in a press release on the report’s findings.
Opioid painkillers accounted to get a nine percent increase of departures in 2014 to 813 individuals.
Increases in prescription opioid pain reliever and heroin deaths are the biggest driver of the drug overdose epidemic.
The latest CDC report shows that deaths from natural opiates such as morphine, codeine and semisynthetic prescription pain killers like oxycodone and hydrocodone has increased 10% from 2013 to 2014 with deaths from heroin overdoses increased by 26%.
Heroin and prescription pain relievers took many of those 2,744 lives in Ohio. “The opioid outbreak is devastating American families and communities”.
In light of the data, the CDC is pushing further to decrease the availability of opioids, and is encouraging law enforcement to crack down on possession offenses in that fight.
Rural West Virginia had one of the worse overdose rates in the US. Almost half a million Americans died from drug overdoses from 2000 through 2014, the CDC says.
Given that the count represents a spike across all demographics-for adults in every age range, for both women and men, and for blacks and non-Hispanic whites alike-the report should certainly be viewed as worrisome.
While prescription-related deaths have been steadily rising for the past 15 years, heroin-related deaths have jumped only recently. The agency is trying to produce new guidelines that would encourage doctors to prescribe potentially addictive painkillers only as a last resort. More people are also dying from fentanyl, an opioid that is sold as a heroin. Most heroin usersinitially start by using prescription painkillers.
But deaths are on the rise from overdoses of all sorts of drugs, despite efforts to formulate them in ways that make the drugs more hard to abuse.
More than that, people addicted to opioids should have access to treatment, including access to naloxone, a drug that can reverse the symptoms in case of an opioid overdose.
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The use of synthetic opioids, like illicitly manufactured fentanyl, coincided with reports from law enforcement warning of increased availability of the drug. They said sales of prescription opioids rose by 300 percent since 1999.
