Tracking the Opioid Crisis
Every day, more than 142 Americans die from overdosing on opioids. The extreme abuse of prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids has caused a national epidemic, becoming one of the leading causes of death, as well as a major cost in the healthcare and employment industry.
The opioid crisis stems from the false endorsement of opioid pain relievers by major pharmaceutical companies, advertising them as non addictive. This advocacy lead to an exponential increase in the distribution and use of opioids. The addictive nature became a concern only after increased rates of opioid overdoses and general misuse became public, however at this point opioids were already a leading cause of future drug addictions.
Between 1999 and 2015, opioid prescriptions increased more than four fold, and in that time there were over 180,000 opioid-related deaths. Regardless of the new transparency regarding the addictive qualities of opioids, around 30 percent of patients who are prescribed opioids continue to misuse them to this day, which often leads to opioid dependencies and can transition to heroin use.
It is necessary to confront this epidemic, to accurately determine the extent of the crisis and then expedite the nation’s recovery process. To do this we need to accurately track the sources of excess circulation and investigate insecure storage facilities, which are a major reason for the over-accessibility of opioids and, consequently, their abuse. The visualization and analysis of opioid-related data, can lead to a greater understanding of risk factors for opioid addiction, as well as track the greatest sources of the over circulation.
20/20 Opioid has collected and parsed data related to opioid overdoses and deaths, and has used it to build an online visualization database. The data was accessed from CDC Wonder database has been sorted depending on characteristics such as the location, ethnicity, race, and age of those afflicted. This information was used to create simulations used to track patterns of of the opioid epidemic.
Most notably, there was a very dramatic connections between race, and probability of being affected by the opioid epidemic. The predominant racial group afflicted with the opioid epidemic during the past 16 was Caucasian, and this group can be further narrowed down to the white male, while groups such as American Indians or Alaska Natives, or Asian or Pacific Islanders are only slightly affected by the epidemic. The second greatest category of deaths is that of the white female population. After a great gap, these two groups are followed by Male and then Female Blacks or African Americans. The immediate conclusion in this case is that the abusers of opioids are mostly the white population. Furthermore, the deaths are centered around the 40-50 year old range, suggesting that the most affected group is the white middle-aged man or woman.
Knowledge of the opioid epidemic patterns is crucial when approaching treatment techniques for the crisis, whether if it by preventing further addictions through more careful prescriptions, or through changes in health care, insurance, and therapy policies in order to increase availabilities in heavily affected regions of the United States.
It is necessary to note that much of the data analysis is limited due to privacy reasons established by the CDC Wonder database, which does not release data if low statistics could result in the identification of individuals. Therefore, when parsing the data it was necessary to use estimations for earlier years, first through combination of data values until the database revealed values for the sum of the set of years. This value was then averaged for the individual years in the set.
Regardless of these limitations, the visualization of the data has increased the transparency of the opioid epidemic, creating a more concrete understanding of which groups are often more likely to being afflicted by the epidemic, as well as suggesting regions of concern which should be focused on when battling the epidemic.