America’s Opioid Crisis: Causality of Genetics and Psychological Factors

Abstract

Opioid addiction is increasingly becoming a crisis throughout the world. In 2016, staggering statistics show “the opioid epidemic accounted for close to 80% of the 64,000 drug-related deaths in the United States and is now the country’s leading cause of accidental deaths” (Goodman-Meza). This problem is not exclusive to the United States: “Because of their capacity to cause respiratory depression, opioids are responsible for a high proportion of fatal drug overdoses around the world” (WHO, 2018). The issue of opioid abuse is especially significant because opioids are so widely used. In fact, “there were an estimated 53.4 million past-year [...] users of opioids...globally in 2017” (UN, 2019). This is not only a problem in the United States, as countries like Mexico and South Africa have shown worrying signs of a potential opioid crisis.