As the drug epidemic began to unfold in the United States, deaths classified as drug-related for 15- to 64-year-olds hit 9% in 2016, up from about 4% less than two decades earlier. But new research published in PLOS ONE from the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University suggests that drug-associated mortality in this country is actually more than double that.
“It’s obvious that the drug epidemic is a major American disaster,” says Penn demographer Samuel Preston, who conducted this work with Georgetown demographer Dana Glei. “The basic records being kept are annual reports on the number of deaths from drug overdose. But that’s only part of the picture.”
Among this group of Americans in 2016, 63,000 deaths were attributed to drug-related causes–mostly poisonings–but Glei and Preston estimate that the overall number of drug-associated deaths is far higher: around 142,000. They also found that, on average, drug use decreased life expectancy after age 15 by 1.4 years for men and by 0.7 years for women–figures that more than doubled for the hardest-hit state, West Virginia.