Katharina Buczek
Since 1999, nearly five hundred thousand people have lost their lives due to the opioid epidemic.
The crisis began in the 1990s when medical providers began prescribing opioids at rapid rates, and pharmaceutical companies “reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted,” according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Consequently, two more waves of opioid deaths followed– one beginning in 2010 that led to a drastic increase in heroin overdoses and a second that began in 2013 due to synthetic opioids such as those containing fentanyl.
Over the past decades, people across the nation have wondered why medical providers continued to provide patients with drugs that are proven to be severely harmful.
Then, in 2020, Purdue Pharma– one of the largest opioid manufacturers– pleaded guilty to “conspiracies to defraud the United States and violate the anti-kickback statute.”
Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen described how “the abuse and diversion of prescription opioids have contributed to a national tragedy of addiction and deaths,” leaving many people hopeful that the guilty plea would help curb the epidemic once and for all.
Unfortunately, though, a new data-driven simulation has revealed that the opioid crisis is projected to get much worse before it gets better.
Mohammad Jalali created the model– an investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School– in collaboration with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The simulation– called SOURCE– is now the most in-depth nationwide model of the opioid crisis ever to be created.
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