An Escalating Problem—How Opioid Addiction Cost the Nation Five-hundred and Four-Billion Dollars in 2017
In a recent White House report, the President’s Council of Economic Advisors tabulated information leading to an absolutely shocking discovery on the true costs of the opioid drug addiction epidemic. According to the report, opioid addiction costs the United States hundreds of billions of dollars annually. In fact, the council estimated that the financial toll of opioid addiction in 2015 came in at five-hundred and four-billion dollars in just that one year.
This is obviously a jaw-dropping estimate, a number much higher than the previously-thought seventy to eighty-billion dollar economic toll from opioids. And one thing to remember is that this is the cost for opioids alone. This is just the opioid epidemic we are talking about here, nothing else.
The report estimates that opioid abuse has caused a far greater economic toll in our country than what was previously estimated. Prior to the 2015 report, the most recent data before that came from a privately conducted analysis done in 2013. This information estimated that opioid epidemic exerted a toll on the nation in the form of seventy-eight-billion dollars that year. Obviously, the 2015 estimate is more than a little bit terrifying, considering that opioids cost the nation about half a trillion dollars in that one year alone.
Where do the Costs Come From?
Of course, one’s first question in all this is to ask where on earth all of those costs came from. One’s first response is to wonder how it is possible that a drug problem could cost the country so much money as to actually significantly add to the U.S. debt load. We can explain those costs here. There are two, primary categories where the United States is hit hard financially by the opioid crisis:
- The first category is the economic toll of having to spend money on law enforcement, medical bills, collateral damage, theft, imprisonment, judicial costs, funeral expenses, emergency response costs, etc. These are all of the actual, fiscal, measurable, time-stamped and invoiced costs that the opioid problem exerts on the United States.
- The other category is a little bit more tricky to measure, but it is just as important as the first category is. This second category is the costs exerted on the nation in the form of lost, potential workforce activity.
From an economic viewpoint, everything has a cost. Even doing nothing has a cost. When a bunch of employees takes sick leave all at once, that is going to have a toll on the company. The same is true with drug addiction. When a drug addict becomes hooked on opioids, they become a cost to society, rather than a plus. They are now a detriment and a risk to the workforce, not a positive, active, productive, and contributing addition to the workforce.
The Council of Economic Advisors at the White House was able to factor in the second point mentioned above, on top of the actual fiscal costs mentioned in the first point. The total was five-hundred and four-billion dollars in 2015, about three percent of the entire United States’ gross domestic product.
The Details of an Extremely Costly Problem
According to the report write-up from the Council of Economic Advisors:
“The opioid drug problem has reached crisis levels in the United States. The problem is worsening at an alarming pace, with opioid-involved overdose deaths doubling in the past ten years and quadrupling in the past sixteen.”
The report went on to give their findings on just how prevalent the opioid problem is in the US:
“2.4 million Americans have an opioid-use disorder, which includes individuals who abuse prescription painkillers such as OxyContin and Vicodin and individuals who abuse heroin or other illicit opioids.”
“2.4 million Americans have an opioid-use disorder, which includes individuals who abuse prescription painkillers such as OxyContin and Vicodin and individuals who abuse heroin or other illicit opioids.”
Some reports indicate that the true gravity of the opioid problem is even greater than that. In fact, some estimates indicate that opioid addiction has trapped as many as eight million Americans.
The Council goes on to give information about the death toll of the opioid problem as well, something that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is quite concerned about. According to the Council, opioids killed more than thirty-three-thousand Americans in 2015, which represents about sixty-three percent of the total addiction-related deaths that year. Then, in 2016, opioids killed about forty-thousand Americans, representing about sixty-six percent of the total addiction-related deaths that year.
The primary reason why the Council of Economic Advisor’s posted a cost estimate that was so much higher than the previous metric was because the White House Council successfully attempted to factor in the massive opportunity lost by all of the addicts not working and the addicts who lost their lives because of an opioid addiction. Most people who abuse opioids are working-age Americans between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five. So when millions of Americans in this age group are doing drugs and risking their lives and the lives of others, that translates to a pretty severe cost on the rest of the country.
Creating a Better Future
In October of 2017, President Trump declared the opioid epidemic a, “National Public Health Emergency.” In doing so, the opioid issue received a label that it had never received before, full recognition coming forth on just how serious this problem really is. However, at the time of the declaration, only fifty-seven-thousand dollars was made available through the Public Health Emergency Fund, so it goes without saying that big change needs to happen, and it needs to happen quickly too.
President Trump has talked a lot about reinstating the War on Drugs and the “Just Say No” campaigns of the 1980s. Unfortunately, most who know a thing or two about just how bad this epidemic has become do believe that Trump's proposals will not be enough. Not by a long shot.
There is much that needs to be done to break the opioid epidemic down and reduce it effectively. Currently, the addiction epidemic has been winning the battle, a growing problem that has persisted almost nonstop for almost twenty years now. Needless to say, we need a change in how we address this epidemic.
The report from the White House briefly discussed potential strategies for reducing the opioid epidemic. The report said that:
“A better understanding of the economic causes contributing to the crisis is crucial for evaluating the success of various interventions to combat it. For example, supply-side interventions that raise the economic costs of supplying legal prescriptions of opioids may have unintended consequences depending on the extent of demand-side substitution induced towards illicit opioids.”
As we look to the future, we actually need to reduce our reliance on opioid drugs. This all started because the American people were sold this idea that we “need” opioid painkillers when in truth most people do not need them. Most people with most pain problems can find relief for those pain problems with over-the-counter pain relief solutions.
With that in mind, we simply need to remove high-strength opioid pain relievers from their status and position of priority in our medical approaches. People need to know these drugs are dangerous, and they need to pursue less addictive, less risky alternatives. With this approach and the rehabilitation of those who are currently addicted, plus increased efforts to remove heroin and other illegal opioids from the streets, we might actually severely decrease the cost and overall toll that opioids have had on our nation.
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