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• This detailed PDF from the Aspen Institute discusses strategies for addressing the opioid crisis in the United States.
• How does local context impact the effectiveness of individual interventions? How can you work to identify solutions that will be the most impactful in your local context?
• Learn more about the role of philanthropy in addressing the opioid crisis.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that 33,000 people died from opioid overdoses in 2015. About half of those were due to prescription opioids, with the rest due to heroin and synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl. These deaths were an avoidable and unnecessary tragedy. Early CDC estimates for 2016 tally more than 64,000 overdose deaths from all drugs, a 21% increase from 2015. An estimated two million Americans are abusing prescription pain relievers and an additional 591,000 are addicted to heroin. The growing use and misuse of opioids is a national crisis.
The Aspen Health Strategy Group selected the opioid crisis as its topic for discussion in 2017, its second year. This group of leaders in and outside health care spent three days considering the topic with the assistance of subject matter experts who prepared four background papers to frame the conversation. The group emerged with five big ideas to confront the opioid crisis.
The Aspen Health Strategy Group’s goal is to promote improvements in policy and practice by providing leadership on important and complex health issues. Co-chaired by Kathleen Sebelius and Tommy Thompson, both former governors and former U.S. Secretaries of Health and Human Services, the group is composed of 24 senior leaders across sectors including health, business, media, and technology. More information about the Aspen Health Strategy Group can be found on the Aspen Institute website. This report captures the deliberations of the group, but no specific proposal or statement in the report should be considered to represent the opinion of any individual member of the group.
Of greatest importance, though, is the law’s role relative to the origin and perpetuation of this epidemic, and of the next one: Market incentives created by the legal and regulatory framework. We federally subsidize manufacturers to sell as much of an addictive product as possible, without requiring manufacturers to project and provide for the foreseeable rates and costs of resulting addictions. Until the law reallocates cost and risk from the public back to manufacturers as an offset against their profits, manufacturer behavior will not change – nor should it. No entity is required to act better than required by law. So the law must change, carrying out in this new context its traditional function of allocating the risk of an endeavor toward those that profit from it and away from those who could neither foresee nor avoid its harms.