Opioid Overdoses Increase Despite CDC’s Efforts

Everyone can agree on a few things. First, we have an opioid epidemic. Second, we want to mitigate it. Third, the efforts we’ve seen at the national level to ameliorate the crisis are not working.

As USA Today recently reported, the opioid epidemic is getting worse instead of better. Two top-level public officials — Dr. Debra Houry, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health — agree that whatever we’re doing to fix the epidemic doesn’t seem to be working. The amount of opioids prescribed has been declining for 5 years, but the number of overdoses has been increasing. So why are we not making progress?