Tackling the Opioid Crisis: An Overview of State Initiatives

The opioid crisis is ravaging communities across the nation and tearing families apart. The crisis has reached epidemic proportions with an estimated 2.6 million experiencing opioid drug abuse. The epidemic has had a detrimental impact in all parts of the country, claiming tens of thousands of victims each year and costing our nation billions of dollars in social, legal, and health care costs. In 1991, doctors wrote 76 million opioid prescriptions. By 2011, that number had nearly tripled to 219 million. Despite a modest drop in the number of opioid prescriptions since 2012, the number of deaths associated with abuse and overdose continues to rise; the mortality rate has quintupled since 1999, and opioid overdoses resulted in over 42,000 deaths in 2016.