TheEconomist looks at the puzzling decline in opioid deaths. America’s most deadly drug epidemic may be starting to peter out, and no one is quite sure why.
“Data published by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, a government agency, suggests that nationally, deaths peaked around August last year. In the 12 months to July this year, there were 90,000 deaths—still an appalling total, but a reduction of around a sixth”
It could be due to law enforcement, the pandemic, drug treatments. Or we may simply have reached some kind of natural peak in the number of people willing to use fentanyl.
“The idea that an epidemic can rise and then burn out, almost independently of the resources that flood into treatment or enforcement, is an uncomfortable one. But it has happened before: the European heroin epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s has not returned. And if this is what is happening with opioids now, the fall in deaths might, most promisingly, be sustained.”
The number of overdose deaths in 1984 were 3266, per perplexity. I would not consider a 16% reduction petering out. Narcan probably has more to do with it than anything else. When overdose deaths are under 10000, that is what I would consider petering out.
And now we know why. The middlemen were being paid big bribes to allow over-prescribing. So graft at the manufacturer, plus graft at the health care PBM leads to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Giant Companies Took Secret Payments to Allow Free Flow of Opioids
Drugmakers including Purdue Pharma paid pharmacy benefit managers not to restrict painkiller prescriptions, a New York Times investigation found.
For years, the benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments.
But those don’t count. Just the one guy who got shot attending a conference for bigwigs in the drug industry, that’s what matters.
