US Life Expectancy Drops For 2nd Consecutive Year Due To Opioid Epidemic

Life expectancy in the U.S. has been steadily increasing since the 1960s due to advancements in nutrition, welfare, and medicine. This is no longer the case, with the life expectancy of U.S. citizens dropping for two years in a row, which is unprecedented since the outbreak of influenza several decades ago. Apparently, this is due to the opioid epidemic currently gripping the country.

The opioid crisis in the U.S. is reaching record highs while the federal government stumbles to address the issue, The Washington Post reports. This has resulted in thousands of deaths every year and for American life expectancy to drop.

As chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch at the National Center for Health Statistics, Bob Anderson noted, this is a problem. To cause a decline for the second year in a row in life expectancy, the drug overdose crisis in the U.S. is a much bigger threat than previously thought.

“It’s not coming out of nowhere because we saw one year of a decline, but it was a bit of a surprise – we sort of expected things to rebound, or at least stay flat,” Anderson said. “We knew that drug overdose mortality was going up because we’ve been monitoring it, but we didn’t think it would be quite enough to cause a second year of decline in life expectancy.”

Associate professor of history at the University of Buffalo, David Herzberg spoke to Futurism on the matter and said that this was not exactly surprising. After all, the country is now being flooded with legal drugs from the pharmaceutical industry with huge incentives for people to keep taking them.

“The numbers are dramatic, in terms of the amount of drugs sloshing around in the American system,” Herzberg said. “It’s not surprising that they’re leading to so many public health problems because we’re not being aggressive enough in responding to it.”