Nearly 20 years after the first wave of opioid overdose deaths in the US, more than 75% of drug overdose deaths were related to opioid use in 2021, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Disease Control and Prevention.
Ophelia explored how U.S. prescription opioid dispensing rates varied by state in 2021 using data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, including information on Medicaid, a public health insurance coverage for low-income households. and people with certain disabilities offered jointly by the states and the federal government.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, overdose deaths related to opioids prescribed for pain treatment increased more than fivefold between 1999 and 2017, when they peaked at 17,000. The number of deaths has since decreased, although there was a slight increase during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the past decade, policies aimed at controlling the dispensing of legal opioids and promoting alternative non-opioid pain treatments have been credited with reducing the number of prescriptions and overdose deaths.
In 2021, even as most states had implemented laws regulating opioid prescribing and opening up access to naloxone (an opioid overdose reversal medication like Narcan), the number of deaths related to prescription opioids rose to 16,700. .
Opioids are Schedule II controlled substances, meaning the DEA considers them narcotics with “a high potential for abuse that may lead to serious psychological or physical dependence.” Although the data included here do not distinguish between reasons for prescribing, opioids prescribed for addiction treatment (such as buprenorphine and methadone) actually work to reduce the incidence of opioid overdoses and associated deaths. Additionally, a 2023 study in JAMA Network Open found that the COVID-era increase in access to methadone for the treatment of opioid use disorder was not associated with an increase in opioid overdose deaths.
Overdose deaths from prescription opioids began to rise in the 1990s, when the increasing circulation of oxycodone and hydrocodone sparked the first wave of widespread opioid abuse. By 2016, opioid-related overdose deaths had reached such alarming levels that the health crisis was considered an epidemic. A year later, the US government declared it a public health emergency.
Since then, 27 states have passed laws regulating the duration or dosage of opioid-based medications first used for the treatment of pain, statutes that resulted in a 2.23% decrease in opioid prescriptions for 2021. However, the introduction of fentanyl into the illegal drug market has set back the fight against opioid-related overdose deaths. The CDC describes the synthetic opioid as “50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine.”
In Wyoming, 4.0% of Medicaid claims were for opioids in 2021, or about 18,000 claims. That’s a change of -3.8 percentage points from 2013, when there were 41,202 total opioid claims. Read the national analysis to see which states had the highest rates of Medicaid opioid prescriptions in 2021.
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