The One State Bucking Nationwide Opioid Abuse Trends

Data from the National Institute on Drug Abuse show that drug overdose deaths have increased significantly since 2019, and opioid-involved overdoses are a top reason why. Indeed, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes on its website that “nearly 75% of drug overdose deaths in 2020 involved an opioid.”

Opioids are substances such as Vicodin, OxyContin, and Percocet that are commonly prescribed by doctors to treat patients for moderate-to-severe pain relief, but research shows that about a third of patients misuse them, and a staggering three million Americans abuse them – often to the point of addiction or overdose.

And while opioid abuse has been getting significantly worse across America year after year over the past decade, one state has been more successful than any other in bucking the nationwide trend.

The efforts of public health officials and hospital workers in Michigan have been well documented over the past two years, altogether demonstrating an impressive 56% reduction in the number of opioid patients the state has. The state has also experienced a 26% drop in opioid abuse. Both declines significantly beat national trends of similar patients over the same period of time.

The promising results are part of a newly-published study in Annals of Surgery, with the research therein gathered and reported by a team from Michigan Medicine, the University of Michigan’s academic medical center.

The teams says that such accomplishments have been achieved by changing the way pain-management medication is prescribed to surgery patients and by efforts to better educate visitors and patients across 70 different hospitals throughout the state about the dangers of opioid abuse. Helping patients get rid of leftover pain management medications and disposing of them safely is yet another measure that public health officials and hospital staff there have put in place, according to the study.

“Our study shows how voluntary prescribing guidelines, and involvement of surgical teams in choosing evidence-based pain care options can really make a difference,” says Chad Brummett, MD, the senior author of the study and a director of pain research at Michigan Medicine’s Department of Anesthesiology.

Ryan Howard, MD, Brummett’s colleague on the analysis and a resident in the U-M Department of Surgery, says understanding how and when opioid abuse occurs has been another key element in the state’s success in the fight against the opioid overdose epidemic.

“Tens of millions of people have operations in the U.S. every year, and most of them go home with a prescription for an opioid painkiller,” Howard says. “Although they are meant for short-term use during recovery from surgery, some patients unfortunately keep filling opioid prescriptions for months or years after surgery, which raises their risk of opioid use disorder, overdose, and death,” he continues. “Reducing those trends is a key part of addressing our national opioid problems.”