The Overdose Epidemic in 3 Pictures
article source: https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/09/20/overdose-epidemic-3-pictures-13424
This article studies the “overdose epidemic” through a series of graphs and diagrams analyzing drug use. The article argues that the “overdose crisis” is not a new occurrence and is only appearing in recent news due to recent political attention. This article provides a view of the crisis through graphs to prevent information unintentionally being concealed as a result of a summarization of the data. The data includes the findings of 600,000 deaths that are classified as “accidental drug poisonings” and uncovers trends that create the “overdose epidemic” focused on in today’s news.
The article presents a graph of mortality rate of all drugs starting in 1979. The deaths, overall, have been increasing exponentially. These findings indicate that the rising overdose deaths began at least 20 years before the “opioid crisis” was declared. This further suggests that recent attention that the crisis has been receiving will be ineffective as the rise in opioid overdoses began much earlier than the attention it received was due.
The next graph presented shows “sub-epidemics”; these are the epidemics of specific drugs over time (from 1999-2016). This graph shows that prescription opioids initially in the Southwest and Appalachia have been more widely distributed into the Western US, OK, FL, and New England, while cocaine remains an urban drug. Younger individuals die from heroine and synthetics and older individuals die from prescription and unspecified drugs. The younger are generally male and the older are frequently female. The last graph presented shows overdose deaths by time and geography. The graph shows the findings detailed above; there is an exponential growth in accidental drug poisonings and they have spread from their initial areas at different rates.
The article concludes that “the overdose epidemic is a composite of multiple sub epidemics”. The measures taken to prevent dangerous drug use have had little effect, lowering deaths from one drug and increasing the use of another. It is also suggested that reduction in drug use or production can be impacted by multiple forces; i.e. legal interdiction and politics.
The proposed solution to this epidemic relates directly to our study of diffusions in networks covered in class. The study of how behaviors or technologies spread through social networks is essential to combating this crisis. In order to have a chance at reducing drug related deaths the focus must be on the sub-groups, or clusters, of the overall network. While the network is currently receiving the attention, researchers argue that “all effective treatment is local”. This relates further to the threshold discussed when explaining how certain behaviors travel between clusters of a network. There must be individual action taken on each of the clusters to have a hope of reducing the detrimental behavior of the overall network.