Pavel Nunez
English 1121
3/11/19
Dr Carrie Hall
Drug Addiction
Every day,  a lot of people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids. The misuse of and addiction to opioids—including prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids such as fentanyl—is a serious crisis in the United States that affects everyone. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total  cost of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States was 1 trillion dollars since 2001 including the costs of healthcare, addiction treatment, and criminals. Before the 90’s this wasn’t even happening and everybody was fine, So what happened?
How did all of this began? “Well In the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to prescription opioid pain relievers, and healthcare providers began to prescribe them at greater rates. This subsequently led to widespread diversion and misuse of these medications before it became clear that these medications could indeed be highly addictive. Opioid overdose rates began to increase. In 2017, more than 47,000 Americans died as a result of an opioid overdose, including prescription opioids, heroin, and illicitly manufactured fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid.That same year, an estimated 1.7 million people in the United States suffered from substance use disorders related to prescription opioid pain relievers, and 652,000 suffered from a heroin use disorder”. Based on the text you can see that drug overdoses are a huge problem in the United States, you can easily get addicted to it, Most of the drugs mentioned can easily be accessed by going to the doctor and getting prescriptions for it, while doing so they also recommend more than the safe dose you’re suppose to get so that is another unfortunate cause, Another is how potent the drug is. Some drugs are stronger than others and can make you develop cravings for it which prevents people from having a normal life without the drug(which they are addicted to).
The government overall is not doing a lot to help prevent this epidemic from getting worse but instead chooses to do other unimportant things like getting involved in another war that has nothing to do with us, increasing taxes, and increasing the military budget which is more than the 7 next countries budget combined . Even now the amount of people getting killed by overdoses of certain drugs just keep increasing and there seems to be nothing being done to help prevent this tragedy.
Mentor Article:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/learning/learning-with-nine-key-questions-about-the-green-new-deal.html
Source:https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/3/16079772/opioid-epidemic-drug-overdoses
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/02/13/585199746/cost-of-u-s-opioid-epidemic-since-2001-is-1-trillion-and-climbing
