Modeling the Prescription Opioid Epidemic.

Opioid addiction has become a global epidemic and a national health crisis in recent years, with the number of opioid overdose fatalities steadily increasing since the 1990s. In contrast to the dynamics of a typical illicit drug or disease epidemic, opioid addiction has its roots in legal, prescription medication-a fact which greatly increases the exposed population and provides additional drug accessibility for addicts. In this paper, we present a mathematical model for prescription drug addiction and treatment with parameters and validation based on data from the opioid epidemic. Key dynamics considered include addiction through prescription, addiction from illicit sources, and treatment. Through mathematical analysis, we show that no addiction-free equilibrium can exist without stringent control over how opioids are administered and prescribed, in which case we estimate that the epidemic would cease to be self-sustaining. Numerical sensitivity analysis suggests that relatively low states of endemic addiction can be obtained by primarily focusing on medical prevention followed by aggressive treatment of remaining cases-even when the probability of relapse from treatment remains high. Further empirical study focused on understanding the rate of illicit drug dependence versus overdose risk, along with the current and changing rates of opioid prescription and treatment, would shed significant light on optimal control efforts and feasible outcomes for this epidemic and drug epidemics in general.

Structural instability and linear allocation control in generalized models of substance use disorder.

Substance use disorder (SUD) is a complex disease involving nontrivial biological, psychological, environmental, and social factors. While many mathematical studies have proposed compartmental models for SUD, almost all of these exclusively model new cases as the result of an infectious process, neglecting any SUD that was primarily developed in social isolation. While these decisions were likely made to facilitate mathematical analysis, isolated SUD development is critical for the most common substances of abuse today, including opioid use disorder developed through prescription use and alcoholism developed primarily due to genetic factors or stress, depression, and other psychological factors. In this paper we will demonstrate that even a simple infectious disease model is structurally unstable with respect to a linear perturbation in the infection term - precisely the sort of term necessary to model SUD development in isolation. This implies that models of SUD which exclusively treat problematic substance use as an infectious disease will have misleading dynamics whenever a non-trivial rate of isolated SUD development exists in actuality. As we will show, linearly perturbed SUD models do not have a use disorder-free equilibrium. To investigate management strategies, we implement optimal control techniques with the goal of minimizing the number of SUD cases over time.