QuickStats: Age-Adjusted Drug Overdose Death Rates, by State United States, 2022 MMWR

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Among people with mental illness, 11.2 percent reported misusing prescribed pain relievers, compared with 3 percent of those with no mental illness. People with SMI were at even greater risk, with a 15.1 percent prevalence of misuse (Hughes et al., 2016). The increase in mortality https://ecosoberhouse.com/ from drug poisoning over the past three decades has been alarming. Nationally, the drug poisoning mortality rate increased from 3.4 to 21.7 deaths per 100,000 population (a 538% increase) between 1990 and 2017 (National Center for Health Statistics [NCHS], 2019b).

Historical perspective on alcohol consumption

• The proportion of people in contact with substance use treatment services ranged from less than 1% to no more than 35% in 2019, in countries providing this data.
• Mental illnesses and SUDs are closely interrelated.13 About 1 in 4 people with a serious mental illness (SMI) have an SUD, and about 1 in 10 people with an SUD have an SMI (National Institute on Drug Abuse [NIDA], 2018).
• However, the counties with the highest drug overdose rates tended to be characterized by a dual economy in which some workers had good high-skilled and decent-paying jobs, and others had low-skilled and low-paying jobs.
• Similar to Ho (2017), Geronimus and colleagues (2019) demonstrated that increasing drug-related mortality was especially concentrated among lower-educated White adults and accounted for 73 percent and 44 percent of the increasing educational disparity in working-age mortality for White men and White women, respectively.

Slow, long-term structural changes and stressors to the U.S. economy, along with unexpected shocks (e.g., the Great Recession), have had differential effects on population subgroups and geographic areas. These trends may explain in part the geographic patterns in drug poisoning mortality discussed in Chapter 4, as well as those affecting other health outcomes discussed later in this report. The surge in fatal drug overdose rates among all groups in the 2010s was due primarily to fentanyl, a synthetic and highly potent illicit opioid with high overdose risk (Kiang et al., 2019; Monnat et al., 2019; Peters et al., 2020). Fentanyl was the primary contributor to overdoses among all racial/ethnic groups starting in the mid-2010s, while Whites continued to have higher rates of overdose from prescription opioids relative to other racial/ethnic groups.

• Among both males and females, alcohol-attributable death rates increased for most cause of death categories.
• The alcohol-attributable death estimates in this study may be conservative because they are based on deaths due to alcohol-related conditions that were identified as the underlying cause of death only; contributing causes of death were not included.
• Also needed is greater understanding of how trends (changes) in physical pain and psychological distress (or subjective measures of despair) vary by individual demographic group, SES, and geography.
• The increases were, however, especially steep in the 2000s compared with the 1990s among those ages 30–60 compared with older adults, among White adults compared with the population as a whole, and among those with a high school education or less compared with those with a college degree or more.
• While the direction of causality is debatable, substantial literature shows strong associations between economic distress and poor mental health and substance misuse (Frasquilho et al., 2016; Galea, Ahern, and Vlahov, 2003; Hempstead and Phillips, 2015; Kaplan et al., 2015; Kerr et al., 2017; Monnat, 2018; Pierce and Schott, 2020).

Global beer consumption

In 2022, New Mexico’s death rate was the highest at 42.7 per 100,000 people, which was more than six times higher than Hawaii, the state with the lowest rate at 7.1 per 100,000 people (Figure 4). In other news, an implant that responds in real time to brain signals helped ease symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in a trial. Meanwhile, a new study of Alzheimer’s disease found diagnosis rates differ widely across the nation in a way not explained by dementia risk factors. However, alcohol-related overdoses — either alone or with drugs — rose between 1999 and 2017. Other alcohol-related causes included heart disease, cancer and accidental injuries such as falls. “With the increases in alcohol use among women, there’s been increases in harms for women including ER visits, hospitalization and deaths,” Aaron White, who authored the paper, told NPR.

Expenditures on alcohol and alcohol consumption by income

Age-standardized alcohol-attributable death rates among females increased from 22.7 per 100,000 population during 2016–2017 to 23.6 during 2018–2019, and to 29.4 during 2020–2021. Death rates among females were highest from heart disease and stroke during each period. Among both males and females, alcohol-attributable death rates increased for most cause of death categories.

Overall, Cherlin suggests that a rising tide of despair is probably an overstatement based on the MIDUS data, concluding that trends in generic happiness, sadness, and life satisfaction differed by SES more so than trends in despair-related psychological and social well-being. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that even if a “rising tide of despair may be an overstatement,” the concentration of declining psychological health among individuals of lower SES is troubling (Cherlin, 2018, p. 7177). Scholars have offered a number of possible demand-related explanations for the surge in drug addiction and overdose seen over difference between drugs and alcohol the past three decades and its particular impact on certain subpopulations and geographic areas. Some of these explanations focus on factors proximate to individuals—physical pain, mental illness, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and psychological distress or despair—and others on factors more structural and distal—macro-level economic and social changes. This section first provides an overview of conceptual models of addictive behaviors and then summarizes the evidence for these explanations. Rural areas experienced faster growth in alcohol deaths than urban areas, driven by sharp rises during the pandemic.

Alcohol use disorder vs. average alcohol intake

• At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
• Scholars who point to increases in the vulnerability of population groups reference the social determinants of health that put some individuals and communities at risk of addiction and substance misuse (Dasgupta, Beletsky, and Ciccarone, 2018).
• For example, Morden and colleagues (2014) document that nearly half of disabled Medicare beneficiaries received a prescription opioid in 2010, and half of those received six or more prescriptions.

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