The prescription opioid and heroin crisis: a public health approach to an epidemic of addiction.

Public health authorities have described, with growing alarm, an unprecedented increase in morbidity and mortality associated with use of opioid pain relievers (OPRs). Efforts to address the opioid crisis have focused mainly on reducing nonmedical OPR use. Too often overlooked, however, is the need for preventing and treating opioid addiction, which occurs in both medical and nonmedical OPR users. Overprescribing of OPRs has led to a sharp increase in the prevalence of opioid addiction, which in turn has been associated with a rise in overdose deaths and heroin use. A multifaceted public health approach that utilizes primary, secondary, and tertiary opioid addiction prevention strategies is required to effectively reduce opioid-related morbidity and mortality. We describe the scope of this public health crisis, its historical context, contributing factors, and lines of evidence indicating the role of addiction in exacerbating morbidity and mortality, and we provide a framework for interventions to address the epidemic of opioid addiction.

Street-drug lethality index: A novel methodology for predicting unintentional drug overdose fatalities in population research.

BACKGROUND: Emerging evidence suggests the composition of local illicit drug markets varies over time and the availability and relative lethality of illicit drugs may contribute to temporal trends in overdose mortality. Law enforcement drug seizures represent a unique opportunity to sample the makeup of local drug markets. Prior research has associated shifts in the types of drugs seized and trends in unintentional drug overdose mortality. The present report builds on this work by demonstrating a novel methodology, the Street-Drug Lethality Index, which may serve as a low-lag predictor of unintentional overdose deaths. METHODS: Data included administrative records of law enforcement drug seizures and unintentional drug overdose deaths in Ohio from 2009 -to- 2018. Death records and lab results from drug seizures occurring during the calendar year 2017 were transformed via the described procedure to create lethality indices for individual drugs. These indices were then summed annually to create the independent variable for a linear regression model predicting unintentional overdose deaths for all years during the study period. RESULTS: The regression model explained 93 % of the year-to-year variance in unintentional overdose fatalities (slope = 0.009480; CI = 0.007369 to 0.011590; t10 = 10.355942; P = 0.000007; Y = 11.808982 + 0.009480X, r2 = 0.931). CONCLUSION: These findings contribute to a growing body of evidence that changes in the composition of the drug supply may predict trends in unintentional overdose mortality. The proposed methodology might inform future overdose prevention and response efforts as well as research.