Does the opioid epidemic finally end?

Fentanyl and heroin addicts may also have been more cautious about how they use these drugs. "It is also plausible that people using heroin adapt their behavior to improve the safety of fentanyl use," says Daniel Ciccarone, professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. "These include taking samples of drugs before consuming, slowing down, getting information about the power by others".

Nevertheless, it is possible that it is a "false dawn", as Keith Humphreys, addiction expert at Stanford told me. "Opioid overdose deaths did not increase between 2011 and 2012, and many people said the wind was reversing, but in 2013, they began to grow again. ", did he declare. Deaths related to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl continue to increase, as do those caused by methamphetamines.

In other words, we will not know if this drop in deaths is "real" for a few years. But "even if it's true, even if we're finally celebrating, it's hard to celebrate," says Andrew Kolodny, a psychiatrist who studies drug addiction at Brandeis University. the inferior the numbers still indicate that about 70,000 people die each year from a drug overdose. Not to mention all babies born in heroin withdrawal, all children placed in foster care and all those who still can not receive treatment and who consume it every day.

"This problem is not limited to deaths," explains Kolodny.