Drug overdoses have lowered life expectancy in 2017

Nearly 70,000 Americans have died in 2017 due to drug overdoses. And that's one of the reasons life expectancy has continued to decline
in the United States compared to 2014, according to health statistics released this Thursday.

"This is the first time we have seen a downward trend since the great flu epidemic of 1918," said Robert Anderson, chief of mortality statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics, who released the new figures.

A number of deaths similar to the HIV epidemic

In 2017, life expectancy at birth was 76.1 years for men and 81.1 years for women. The average for the population was 78.6, compared to 78.9 in 2014. "These statistics alert us and show that we are losing too many Americans, all too often, for preventable causes," said the director of disease control and prevention, Robert Redfield.

The scourge of drug overdoses began in the early 2000s, its intensity accelerating for four years. In 2017, about 70,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, 10% more than in 2016. In terms of deaths, Robert Anderson compares this to the peak of the HIV epidemic, with one difference: quickly declined. The statistician hopes that the overdoses will follow the same path.
"We are a developed country, life expectancy should increase, not decrease," he says.

Two categories of overdoses

There are two categories of overdoses: on the one hand non-opiate drugs, such as cocaine, methamphetamine and other psychostimulants including MDMA, which caused 27,000 deaths. But the increase is largely due to the second category: opiates. This includes heroin, morphine, and so-called semi-synthetic opiates such as oxycodone, a prescription painkiller but diverted to the black market.

Lately, the majority of deaths came from a new generation: synthetic opiates, like fentanyl, dozens of times more potent than heroin, where a dosage error can be fatal. The rate of synthetic opiate deaths doubled from 2015 to 2016. Last year, it increased "only" by 45%.