Are Opioid Deaths Responsible for the Unprecedented Decline in US Life Expectancy?
Why is the so-called "medical freedom movement" so uncurious?
Podcaster Mark Kulacz of “Housatonic Live” has recently been discussing the role of opioids in declining life expectancy while calling out prominent members of the medical freedom movement for downplaying its significance. To follow up on these assertions I did some digging and I came upon these charts in an article by Max Roser from “Our World in Data.”
The first graph indicates that US life expectancy started to decline in 2016, four years before the profoundly damaging “pandemic” countermeasures and five years before the mass transfections.
Chart 1: M. Roser (2020) Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries? Our World in Data.
The focus of the article is not about this unprecedented decline is life expectancy. It is about why US life expectancy still lags so far behind that of its OECD peers despite astronomical expenditures in health care. This difference should not surprise anyone who has studied this issue in depth, but what merits further exploration is how both costs AND life expectancy in the US started to deviate from its OECD counterparts in the mid 1980’s.
Even though the US is worse for obesity, road injuries, infant mortality, homicide (Chart 2), only opioid deaths (Chart 3) are consistently trending upwards. Notably, US deaths attributed to opioids started to deviate substantially from the OECD norm only after 2000. It then accelerated exponentially after 2010. What changed during these years?
Chart 2: M. Roser (2020) Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries? Our World in Data.
Chart 3: M. Roser (2020) Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries? Our World in Data.
Roser acknowledges the enormity of this spike in opioid-related deaths and admits this might play a role in the growing difference between the US and its OEDC peers:
In the US the death rate has increased more than 10-fold since 1990, while opioid overdoses have remained an extremely rare cause of death in other countries. No other country in the world has seen a surge in opioid overdose deaths as large as the US. Today the US has by far the highest opioid overdose death rate.
Opioid overdoses are still thankfully a relatively rare cause of death overall (it is the cause of death of 1.6% of Americans), but these deaths affect life expectancy because many victims are relatively young.
Roser also references a recent in-depth study showing how the role of illicit opioids far exceeds that of opioid prescriptions and suicides (Charts 4 and 5).
Chart 4: C.J. Ruhn (2018) “Deaths of Despair or Drug Problems?” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 24188
Chart 5: C.J. Ruhn (2018) “Deaths of Despair or Drug Problems?” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 24188
Unfortunately, instead of revisiting the opioid issue in his closing remarks Roser cites our “lack of success in preventing poor health outcomes” and lists “smoking, obesity, violence, (and) poverty” among the “important factors,” even though NONE of these causes of premature death were trending upwards in his charts. Roser then proceeds to further bury the opioid issue by citing the “global pandemic” as a further impediment to “reversing the recent trend of declining life expectancy” in the US.
While some readers might be inclined to write off Max Roser as a coward or meddler for his evasiveness, I beg to differ: As a college teacher who has frequently pushed the boundaries of mainstream settings I understand the importance of nuance. After all, Charts 1 and 3 alone provide damning evidence and Roser’s closing statement subtly invites the discerning reader to take a closer look at the role of opioids:
For the years ahead a focus on the high death rates of causes of deaths that kill younger people can be the starting point to get the US population back on track towards a longer and healthier life.
The only thing I can add is this heartbreaking video posted by Kulacz.
Kudos to Max Roser for successfully providing us with tools that make it easier for us to discuss the explosive significance of this trend in a mainstream setting.