Question

Write an abstract/brief summary of the Economic and Social Cost of the Opioid Crisis in the US. Provide some data/research about this problem. Please write as much as you can and don't copy everything from the internet.

Answer 1

According to a recent report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the opioid crisis cost US$ 696 billion in 2018 and more than $2.5 trillion from 2015 to 2018. The last CEA in 2015 estimated the expense of the opioid crisis, estimating the price at over $500 billion. The department measured new figures for the years that followed, using similar methods. The figures of the CEA are several times higher than those reported by several other researchers, partly because the death toll from the crisis has risen in recent years and partly because the organization uses a different approach than other researchers to seek to quantify the greater cost of premature death in society.

One can grasp the opioid crisis in three waves. In the first phase, starting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, doctors prescribed several opioid painkillers. This caused the drugs to proliferate into widespread misuse and addiction not only among patients, but also among friends and patient families, teenagers who took the drugs from the medicine cabinets of their parents, and people who purchased excess pills from the black market.

A second wave of drug overdoses began in the 2000s when heroin entered the black market, when drug dealers and smugglers took advantage of a growing population of people who used opioids but had either lost access to pain relievers or simply found a better, cheaper high. And the US has seen a third surge in recent years, as illegal fentanyl provides an alternative to heroin that is much more potent, cheaper and deadlier .