Opioid Crisis: A Concern For Nearly 2 Million Children

Opioid Crisis: A Concern For Nearly 2 Million Children

Introduction

A new analysis shows that approximately 2 million children are affected by the U.S. opioid crisis, and the numbers seem to be rising.

According to the analysis from the United Hospital Fund, a health policy nonprofit based in New York, the primary reason for children to get affected by the crisis is parents' use of opioids. A child separated from a drug addict parent, or a child whose parents died due to an overdose of opioids can also be affected by it. The analysis also asserts that an estimated 170,000 kids had opioid use disorder themselves or had accidentally taken the drugs in recent years.

The analysis suggests that these children are likely to incur higher expenses than others during childhood, which estimates to $117.5 billion in health care, special education, and child welfare, along with societal costs of $62.1 billion during adulthood. The analysis also concluded that even after a continual downward trend in opioid usage, there still could be 4.3 million children affected by the opioid crisis at $400 billion by 2030.

Opioids are on the market for ages and have been used basically for pain relief for post-surgical pain, cancer-related pain, chronic or persistent pain. Opioids when used in proper dosage and along with a combination of other pain treatments, work in relieving pain successfully, unless there is a misuse or abuse of the drug.

Companies manufacturing opioids convinced the medical community that these medications were not addictive and were purely beneficial. This belief raised the number of prescriptions and sales unwarrantedly, resulting in a mass misuse of these drugs, to the extent that this was identified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a public issue and named it an opioid crisis.

There are more than 1,900 opioid lawsuits consolidated under MDL No. 2804 (In Re: National Prescription Opiate Litigation), presided by U.S. District Judge Dan Polster.