This simple math would strongly suggest that the war on drugs has not basis in MATH. It is pretty common knowledge that addiction – regardless of what a person is demonstrating addictive behavior about – There is typically stated that addiction has a substantially underlying mental health issues. The Graph below that there is abt 4.8 million people =>12 y/o are dealing with OUD. It is routinely stated that there is some 100 million people dealing with chronic pain and others claim that certain opioids are EXTREMELY ADDICTING.
The number of prescription opioid doses dispensed in the United States each year has varied but has been estimated to be in the tens of billions of dosage units annually. The DEA reported figures ranging from 12 to 17 billion dosage units dispensed at the retail level in recent years.
over 120 million opioid prescriptions dispensed annually
SO, if – as some claim – that many/all opioids are EXTREMELY ADDICTING, why is there only 4.8 million people dealing with OUD?
The question has to be asked? Why are we refusing to treat chronic pain pts, if the numbers would suggests that we are denying the majority of chronic pain pts from having their chronic medical issues properly treated, just like we treat all other people with chronic medical issues. Since most of the chronic pain pts are DISABLED, why is our system discriminating on this category of disabled people?
Could it be that our DOJ/DEA has had an agenda since 1970 and it is unthinkable for bureaucrats to admit they have been wrong? When is the last time anyone has heard a bureaucrat admit they were wrong?
In 2024, 4.8M people (12 or older) had a past year opioid use disorder. Of those, 17% (818,000 people) received medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) in the past year. More data in the 2024 hashtagNSDUH: samhsa.gov/data/nsduh
Filed under: General Problems
There’s an even more ridiculous form of drug war math – lives saved. In April, Pam Bondi announced the capture of a certain amount of fentanyl, “enough to kill 280 million people.” Last week Kristi Noem displayed 20 kg of fentanyl at a press conference, and said getting that fentanyl off the streets saved “10 million lives.” Another administrator figure said yesterday that another bust had saved “100 million lives.” In the past few months, they’ve saved the lives of every American citizen – maybe even saving some more than once.
But I have some serious points about supposed opioid deaths. First, only 5% of US decedents are autopsied, down from 8.7% before covid, and 50% in 1970. Half the jurisdictions in this country have elected coroners, not medical examiners. Few jurisdictions require coroners to have any scientific, medical or forensic training. In 2007, a coroner in Indiana was elected and serving while in high school.
There’s been chronic shortages of coroner and ME staff going back to at least the 1990s, and many offices don’t have in-house histology or toxicology labs. When I checked in 2020, sending out samples from one decedent for drug testing cost $2500 (I tried to update this figure in 2025, but the websites are now set up to only quote prices to organizations providing them information on a web form first). The money earmarked for death investigations, divided by the number of decedents wouldn’t cover the amount of testing to prove that tens of thousands of Americans have been ODing on opioids.
One more ridiculous bit of drug war math. A 2018 Boston Globe headline claimed that every resident of Massachusetts had a friend of loved one die of OD. I looked up the 2016 & 2017 state population numbers, death totals and deaths attributed to opioids. By the magic of arithmetic, I was able to calculate that each of the unfortunate decedents referenced in the headline had to have had over 800 friends and loved ones (not counting those outside the state). But I found something else, even more interesting – over those two years, deaths attributed to opioids had declined by several hundred from 2016 to 2017, while the state had gained over 100,000 new residents. There could have been a happy headline: “MA OD Deaths Down.”
I guess the only way to “save lives” is stopping hypothetical future deaths.