Alcohol Facts and Statistics National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism NIAAA

stats on the destruction of alcohol vs hard drugs

The increases were, however, especially steep in the 2000s compared with the 1990s among those ages 30–60 compared with older adults, among White adults compared with the population as a whole, and among those with a high school education or less compared with those with a college degree or more. Thus, Ho (2017) concluded that the increased death rate from drug poisoning from the early 1990s to the 2010s was especially steep among the less educated and accounted for large shares (~70% for men and ~44% for women) of increasing educational disparities in working-age mortality over this period. However, the increase was especially pronounced for Whites with a high school degree or less, among whom the death rate for poisoning increased more than four-fold over the period. Average annual number of deaths from excessive alcohol use, including partially and fully alcohol-attributable conditions, increased approximately 29% from 137,927 during 2016–2017 to 178,307 during 2020–2021, and age-standardized death rates increased from approximately 38 to 48 per 100,000 population.

  • However, these studies have been hampered by the inability to examine those trends by decedents’ educational attainment.
  • Drug experts broadly agree that individuals and society would arguably be better off if marijuana became the most accepted recreational intoxicant of choice instead of alcohol.
  • We were unable to identify dose-response information for other endpoints of cannabis (e.g. mental health problems, chronic risk, or other cannabis-constituents besides THC).
  • There were 1,047 fatal drug overdoses in 2017 in that county, but an opioid-specific International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code was included on only 45 death certificates (CDC, 2020b).
  • Death certificates include one underlying cause of death (UCD)—the cause the certifier has determined led directly to the death—and up to 20 contributing causes (i.e., MCDs).

Age and Gender Differences in Addiction Rates

More systematic completion of the MCD section on death certificates would facilitate research on comorbid physical and mental health conditions and on the interrelationships among mental illnesses, SUDs, and suicides. Information from more complete and accurate death certificates could also be integrated into population surveillance, cohort studies, and interventional clinical trials addressing use of drugs and alcohol. The committee’s recommendations differ from those prior recommendations in that they do not focus on specific policy and practice strategies. Rather, the committee believes broad efforts are needed to address all components of the U.S. addiction and overdose crisis, on both the supply and demand sides. As policy makers, state health officials, and physicians began to recognize the dangers of opioids and prescribing subsequently declined, prescription opioids became less available and more expensive. As a result, people who had become addicted to or dependent on them (and people with existing heroin addictions) turned increasingly to heroin.

Statistics On Opioid Addiction And Abuse

  • After losing their well-paying jobs on the assembly lines, which many had held for years, they found themselves in an unfriendly economy that favored high education and connections.
  • They found that developmental patterns of depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, heavy drinking, and drug use were generally similar across all racial/ethnic, educational, and geographic subgroups, with recent rises in these adverse outcomes beyond age 30 (which the cohort reached in approximately 2010).
  • Hospitalization data Data from the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) allow exploration of alcohol and drug related hospital visits (admissions and emergency department visits).
  • This complicates the ability to draw a clear link between cohort-based trends in the availability and consumption of alcohol among younger adults and subsequent period changes in mortality among older adults.

Alcohol sales per capita went up more from 2019 to 2021 than in any two-year period since 1969, according to estimates from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Deaths from excessive https://ecosoberhouse.com/article/anger-and-alcoholism/ alcohol use are also rising, as are deaths where the underlying cause of death was alcohol-related. Alcohol has been linked with over 200 conditions, impacting basically every single organ system.

Off-label treatment for alcohol use disorder is linked to slower liver decline, study suggests

Additionally, the available toxicological thresholds (i.e. LD50 values) have considerable uncertainty (for example, more than a factor of 10 for diazepam in different species). However it has been previously shown that the animal LD50 is closely related to fatal drug toxicity in humans60. The sensitivity analysis based on human data for ethanol shows that the average MOE result is similar to the result based on animal LD50. For cannabis and nicotine, alcoohol is better than drugs the discrepancy in the sensitivity analysis can be explained in the chosen endpoints (no dose response data on mortality in humans were identifiable in the literature). For example, the only available human toxicological endpoint for cannabis as chosen by EFSA55 was “psychotropic effects”. The rationale for choosing this endpoint was the exclusion of risk for the inadvertent and indirect ingestion of THC when hemp products are used as animal feed55.

stats on the destruction of alcohol vs hard drugs

Promoting and Protecting the City’s Health

  • It’s important to know the facts about addiction to better understand how specific substances can impact your life.
  • The rise in drug poisoning deaths has been well studied, and that research has yielded some plausible explanations for this phenomenon.
  • As noted earlier in this chapter, drug poisoning mortality rates have risen in metro and nonmetro areas alike and across all racial/ethnic groups (to varying degrees) since the early 1990s.
  • U.S. deaths from causes fully due to excessive alcohol use increased during the past 2 decades.
  • This literature has confirmed, for example, higher rates of back and neck pain (Viana et al., 2018), risk of arthritis (Aguilar-Gaxiola et al., 2016), and hypertension (Stein et al., 2014) among those with chronic mental conditions.
  • While substantial research has already focused on explaining the rise in substance-related mortality in the United States over the past three decades, this research has been limited by several research and data gaps, which are discussed below.

Heightened Risk of Disease

stats on the destruction of alcohol vs hard drugs

  • Among Black males and females ages 25–44, rates remained relatively low and stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, followed by an uptick in the 2010s.
  • Qualitative research, which provides compelling evidence for the role of increasing despair in substance use and overdose, can offer insights for demographers, economists, and epidemiologists who seek to develop and test strong measures of despair.
  • These measures included instituting prescribing limits, monitoring prescribing to identify excessive levels, and implementing “pill mill” laws requiring providers to submit clinical documentation from medical records to support their prescribing of opioids (Kiang et al., 2019).
  • There are 250 drugs classified as Schedule I. Some examples of Schedule I drugs include ecstacy, heroin, synthetic heroin, LSD, marijuana, and peyote.

Wegovy linked to lower risk of alcohol use disorder in real-world study

stats on the destruction of alcohol vs hard drugs