If opioid addiction isn't on your radar screen, perhaps it should be.
Life expectancy in the United States fell in 2015 and 2016, the first two-year period that occurred since 1962-1963 (at the height of the tobacco epidemic and amid a wave of flu), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced this week.
The drop was driven, according to the CDC, by a reduced life expectancy in males and fueled by a 21 percent rise in drug overdose-related deaths.
On top of that, the trends are such that 2017 could bring a drop in U.S. life expectancy for a third straight year. That would mark the first time that occurred since the Spanish flu pandemic killed 500 million across the world in 1917-1919.
Those of a certain age might be able to recall the rise of illegal drugs in the mid- to late-1960s, the LCD and heroin that proliferated through the 1970s, the cocaine craze that rose in the 1980s, the emergence of methamphetamine in the late 1990s and realize that none of those caused a two-year drop in the life expectancy rate.
Do we have your attention yet?
Generally, the wider availability of prescription painkillers beginning around 1999 is thought to have led to an increase in addictions, and the increase in addictions in turn has led to an increase in U.S. overdose deaths. The number of deaths has increased ever since.
"What we're seeing now is the second wave of this epidemic," Anna Lembke, a behavioral sciences professor at Stanford University and an addiction expert, told The Guardian. "The first wave started with physicians overprescribing The second wave has translated into widespread, increased use of illicit opioids, of heroin, of fentanyl (a painkiller said to be 50 times stronger than heroin), of heroin laced with fentanyl."
She was not optimistic for a quick fix.
"This is going to take a good 10 to 20 years to really turn around," said Lembke. "We've got multiple generations of people that are already addicted, and it's going to be a real struggle to help those people."
CDC numbers put the struggle in perspective.
For every one person who dies of an opioid overdose, 18 people have a substance use disorder involving heroin, 62 have a substance abuse disorder involving a prescription, 377 people misused prescription opioids in the past year and 2,946 people used opioids in the past year.
While President Donald Trump declared the overdose epidemic a public health emergency this year, a declaration doesn't free one opioid abuser from a life he or she may or may not want to give up.
In Tennessee, substance abuse is a $2 billion problem, more than half of which is attributed to lost income from people falling out of the labor market.
That amount, according to Tennessee Health Sciences Center officials, also includes more than $46 million for children born with neonatal abstinence syndrome, more than $422 million for hospitalization costs associated with opioid abuse and nearly $375,000 for emergency room visits associated with opioid abuse.
And those figures don't include higher medical costs for all patients, costs for jails for those who get on the other side of the law in feeding their habit and the loss of sales tax revenue from those out of the workforce due to their abuse.
In 2012, Tennessee had the second highest rate in the country of opioid prescriptions (1.4 per person), but has made progress since through investments in substance abuse treatment, through fewer opioids prescribed and dispensed, and through regulated pain management clinics.
Still, since the number of opioid deaths, the number of children born with withdrawal symptoms from their mothers' usage and the overall costs keep rising, there is more to do.
While the prescription/dispensing/manufacturing/distributing end must be a priority for use of money from governmental bodies, Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond has been proactive at the other end in lobbying to have mentally ill and addicted people out of jail and in facilities where they can get treatment. We believe he's on the right track there.
As Lembke noted above, no quick fix is on the horizon, and it's clear that governmental money flowing to the problem will go up before it goes down.
"One-time grants are ultimately not going to change the course of this epidemic," she said. "It's going to require systemic changes, infrastructure changes, changes in the ways that health care delivery happens."
In 2014, U.S. life expectancy had reached 78.9 years. Last year, it slipped to 78.6 years. That third of a year doesn't mean much to an out-of-work, opioid-addicted 40-year-old, but it's a trend to which we all should turn our attention.