prescription drugs

Drug Overdose Deaths May Have Declined in 2018

Preliminary data released by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) over the summer suggest the rate of drug overdose deaths is declining or at least has “begun to plateau,” as Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar put it last week.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Hayward: Progressives See Opportunity in Opioid Disaster

It would be excessive to call the opioid crisis an orchestrated conspiracy, but it certainly does have aspects of a manufactured crisis: a problem created by politicians and then exploited by them to advance various agendas. Loose borders created the problem by allowing a tidal wave of deadly street drugs into the United States. Politicians are using the resulting crisis to attack the pharmaceutical industry and the criminal justice system. We could end up releasing an enormous number of criminals from prison because the drug epidemic put too many people in jail.

The Associated Press

Better OxyContin Leads to Worse Heroin Epidemic

The conventional wisdom on the opioid crisis is that prescription drug dependency was a major factor behind the surge of addictions and overdoses. This belief was challenged by studies demonstrating that prescription drug problems from the 1990s and 2000s were fading before the current opioid crisis began, and the real problem today is with street drugs like heroin and fentanyl. New research highlights a very sharp dividing line between the earlier pill problem and today’s drug crisis: OxyContin was reformulated in 2010 to cut down on abuse, so addicts turned to heroin.

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