The FAMCare Blog

“Opioid addiction is here to stay,” said a social work professor we recently interviewed. “But as long as we turn away from the horrors of this widespread addiction and choose to remain in denial, we will not make a concerted effort to widely administer treatment. The pharmaceutical industry has already created both long term treatments and emergency life-saving medications that are simply not being administered on a wide enough scale. I believe that a nationwide effort to make these medications available to anyone trapped in this particular substance abuse disorder should be a number-one priority for the social work profession at large.”

We recently interviewed a retired social worker who spent her entire 30-year career working with addicts and alcoholics in residential treatment centers. We were seeking insight into the drug and alcohol abuse epidemic that seems to be getting worse every year. The insights she shared rang with understanding, empathy, and a double dose of common sense.

Addiction is a disease, not a crime. The American Society of Addiction Medicine recognizes addiction as “a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences. People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences.”

As so often happens in our modern 24-hour news cycle the latest crisis pushes any ongoing crisis off the front page and out of public consciousness. COVID 19 and January 6th have all but eliminated the opioid addiction epidemic from our front-page view. However, the crisis has not gone away. Provisional data from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate that there were an estimated 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 12-month period ending in April 2021, an increase of 28.5% from the 78,056 deaths during the same period the year before. The new data documents that estimated overdose deaths from opioids increased to 75,673 in the 12-month period ending in April 2021, up from 56,064 the year before. Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids (primarily fentanyl) and psychostimulants such as methamphetamine also increased in the 12-month period ending in April 2021.

Nearly 500,000 people died from opioid overdoses from 1999-2019. This epidemic of opioid overdose deaths can be outlined in three distinct waves.

1. The first wave began with increased prescribing of opioids in the 1990s, with overdose deaths involving prescription opioids (natural and semi-synthetic opioids and methadone) increasing since at least 1999.
2. The second wave began in 2010, with rapid increases in overdose deaths involving heroin.
3. The third wave began in 2013, with significant increases in overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids, particularly those involving illicitly manufactured fentanyl. More than 14,000 deaths involving illicitly manufactured synthetics occurred in 2019, which is equivalent to about 38 deaths per day.

Drug and alcohol use remains a severe problem among school age children, with the National Institute on Drug Abuse showing that 5.4% of 8^th graders, 9.8% of 10^th graders, and 14.3% of 12^th graders use illicit substances, and nearly 1.3 million teens have a substance use disorder. Unfortunately, recovery treatment is often unsuccessful when teens return to their schools and are surrounded by the same peers and the same opportunities to use. Data shows that nearly 70% of students who attend recovery and return to their school will relapse in 6 months or less.

Not long ago, addiction recovery meant signing in to a “rehab”, attending daily meetings with your peers, intensive face-to-face therapy sessions with an addiction therapist, and reading the Big Book to guide you along the 12-Step path. The recovery process could take months or even years before the addict or alcoholic was declared ready to go it alone. Then, the pandemic.