The opioid crisis has been around for several years now, lurking in the shadows of drug abuse and neglect. However, no one speaks about the prescription overdoses or the abuse of prescription drugs. The opioid crisis has no longer just become one or the other, it’s become a multi-media issue that’s been covered by a number or locations and people with many different views upon the way it’s listed.
It doesn’t mean, necessarily, that the prescriptions we use will automatically make us addicts to drugs. In the image above, it’s not just prescriptions that are being used. The opioid crisis is built from more than just the drugs we use. It’s based upon the overuse, misuse and addiction to what makes us, as a whole society, feel better.
However, because opioids are so readily available and are used so regularly within medicine, situations like surgery, treating medical conditions or just for a simple cold that we don’t realize how easy it is to become addicted to a pill or a stronger drug, like heroin or cocaine.
Above you can see a chart that shows the differing effects of the opioid crisis on society. More than 115 Americans die from overdoses every day. Within that group, that number rose 21 percent between 2016 and 2017. The truly upsetting statement on the chart, however, is that only one person in every 10 receive treatment for their addiction. This rate has been slowly climbing, as with the number of deaths by overdoses, since then.
Finally, who is to blame with such incidences? Is it the doctors that perscribe the drugs that people get addicted to? What about the companies that create drugs that are easily abused to become tools of death instead of tools of aid? In recent cases, like with the Johnson and Johnson case, the companies that make the perscriptions are being blamed and made to pay the consequences.
Typically, however, it seems that there is more to the addiction issue than just a simple company or just someone wanting a high. There’s been studies within the case that it is a mental disease just like depression or anxiety is. However, there has yet to be a true cure to addiction. It’s not just that we can take a person in, fix their habits, and keep them clean, yet there are the people that relapse and go back to using the substance or go back to the bad habits they had been trying to quit. Whether it’s because they’re surrounded by people who set bad examples, or because they just want quick relief from the stresses of life, there won’t be an end to the crisis until help becomes more readily available to those who need it.
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