ArticleThe International journal on drug policy2024
What would it really take to solve the overdose epidemic in the United States?
Article in The International journal on drug policy, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Organizational perspectives on the impacts of scaling up overdose education and naloxone distribution in Kentucky.Addiction science & clinical practice · 2025Trial
- Socioenvironmental disasters and the dialectics of overdose mortality.The International journal on drug policy · 2026Article
- Regulation of glial markers expression in the rat basolateral amygdala and hippocampus during morphine aversive memory retrieval and its extinction.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2025Article
- The effect of lifting eviction moratoria on fatal drug overdoses in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Opioid-use disorder and reported pain after spine surgery: Risk-group patterns in cognitive-appraisal processes in a longitudinal cohort study.North American Spine Society journal · 2025Article
- Burden of non-CO poisoning in 204 countries and territories, 1990-2021: results from the global burden of disease study 2021.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- The opioid epidemic and accessibility to free Wi-Fi: internet access is a human rights issue.Harm reduction journal · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The high overdose mortality rates in the United States poses several questions: Why have they been increasing exponentially since 1979? Why are they so high? And how can they be greatly reduced? Building on past research, the causes of the increase seem to be deeply rooted in US social and economic structures and processes, rather than due only to opioid prescription patterns or the advent of synthetic opioids. Given this, we consider what changes might be needed to reverse the exponentially-increasing overdose mortality. We use a path dependency argument to argue that the United States political, economic, and public health systems have helped create this crisis and, unfortunately, continue to heighten it. These same systems suggest that proposals to expand harm reduction and drug treatment capacity, to decriminalize or legalize drugs, or to re-industrialize the country sufficiently to reduce "communities of despair" will not be enacted at a scale sufficient to end the overdose crisis. We thus suggest that in the United States serious improvements in overdose rates and related policies and structures require massive social movements with a broad social change agenda.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.