Op-Ed: Don’t let Adderall scarcity trigger a repeat of the opioid epidemic
A new study suggests that the drug abuse epidemic is not linked to the opioid epidemic.
In early 2016, a federal study reported that in the United States, the use of prescription opioid painkillers, including codeine and oxycodone, had increased more than 60-fold since 1999.
In the following year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that opioid overdoses had killed more than 42,000 people in the United States in 2015.
By 2016, addiction and overdoses had become a public health crisis.
This pattern has been repeated in many parts of the world. The opioid epidemic has spread from its origins in the United States (which, according to the CDC, is linked to other countries in the world).
And, a new report in the British Medical Journal suggests these crises are not connected.
According to the study’s lead author, a recent survey among young people in Britain found that the opioid crisis was not correlated with the prescription drug abuse epidemic that has spread to other parts of the world.
The authors of the study said the prescription opioid abuse epidemic and the associated opioid overdose epidemic was not an inevitable consequence of the earlier drug abuse epidemic. They conclude that the two crises do not share similar causes, or that they have different causal factors.
But, the authors say, “The current opioid crisis is far larger than its predecessors and has spread to other countries around the world. We found no evidence of a link between the two.”
In a recent survey published in the BMJ, researchers examined data from the National College of Medical Research and found that prescription drug abuse and overdose deaths accounted for fewer than 1 percent of youth suicide in Britain.
These results suggest that the prescription drug abuse epidemic and the associated opioid overdose epidemic are not correlated with the opioid crisis in the United States.
The study, led by
