Addiction is a cunning and deadly disease, and it’s killing more of us than ever before. In the last half-century, the United States has endured three major drug epidemics.
The first began in the 1970s with returning Vietnam war vets addicted to heroin. The death rate due to overdoses was about 1 per 100,000 people. America’s second drug epidemic occurred in the 1980s due to crack cocaine. The overdose death rate doubled to nearly 2 per 100,000. Now, with America’s third major drug epidemic, fatal overdoses attributed to opioids alone claim about 47,000 American lives a year — a rate of 14 per 100,000.
Many of these deaths resulted from a medical professional legitimately prescribing an opioid for pain management. All too often, however, the patient becomes addicted or misuses the drug and overdoses. Sometimes the patient sadly decides that suicide is the only way to escape the mental health nightmares that accompany severe opioid addiction. Unfortunately for veterans, opioid addiction is more prevalent than for nonveterans because pain is more often an issue.
