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Drug addiction, suicide take toll in US
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Life expectancy in the United States dropped yet again as drug overdose deaths continued to climb — taking more than 70,000 lives in 2017 — and suicides rose, according to a US government report released yesterday.
The drug overdose rate rose 9.6 percent compared to 2016, while suicides climbed 3.7 percent, said the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. As a result, the average life span in America dropped to “78.6 years, a decrease of 0.1 year from 2016.”
The data comes as the United States grapples with an opioid epidemic, fueled by addiction to prescription painkillers as well as street drugs such as heroin and synthetic opioids including fentanyl.
“Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the nation’s overall health and these sobering statistics are a wake-up call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable,” said CDC Director Robert Redfield.
Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the NCHS said declines like this haven’t been seen since the great flu pandemic of 1918 and World War I.
“We’re a developed country, we have a lot of resources, we should have increasing life expectancy,” he said.
CDC figures showed that a total of 70,237 people died of overdoses in 2017.
The rise — although dramatic at nearly 10 percent year on year — was about half the spike seen a year earlier.
In 2016, 21.6 percent more people died from overdoses compared to 2015.
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