Published 30 October 2017
The statistics are staggering, and it is hard to overstate the scale of use and abuse of drugs in the U.S. A model developed by Dr. Hawre Jalal, faculty researcher at the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory (PHDL) at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, demonstrates that the typical overdose victim is becoming younger and more urban, as reported by The Economist on October 26, 2017 in The shifting toll of America’s drug epidemic. The results (“Sub-epidemics within the Opioid Epidemic”, H. Jalal, J. Buchanich, L. Balmert, M. Roberts and D. Burke) presented by Dr. Jalal at the October 2017 Annual Society for Decision Making (SMDM) Meeting in Pittsburgh, PA, shows red alerts for U.S. drug overdose deaths per 100,000 population by age, demographics and drug type. The highest rates of prescription-opioid abuse can be found among midde-aged rural whites, including women. By contrast, both fentanyl and heroin users tend to be much younger, more likely to live in cities, somewhat more racially diverse and overwhelmingly male.
In another article, Forecasting the opioid epidemic, on October 28, 2017, The Economist raised the questions: When will the opioid epidemic peak? And how many will it kill? Dr. Donald Burke, dean of the Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, points out that the number of fatal drug overdoses has doubled every eight years for the past 37. Epidemiologists are frantically scrambling to go beyond simple best-guess estimates to dynamic models that can forecast addiction and overdose more accurately. Dr. Jalal and other scientists from the PHDL at the University of Pittsburgh are developing a dynamic transmission disease model of the opioid epidemic, matching data in the national drug-use survey to outcomes in mortality. These results (“A dynamic transmission disease model of the opioid epidemic”, D. Sinclair, H. Jalal, M. Roberts, D. Burke) presented by Dr. David Sinclair, PHDL post-doctoral researcher, at the 2017 Annual SMDM Meeting. predict that prescription opioid deaths will rise slowly to about 20,000 a year within the next five years, but heroin and fentanyl deaths will increase markedly to 72,000 per year by 2025.