YOUR SAY: The quiet epidemic

A recent scientific paper co-authored by a Nobel Prize winner spoke of a "lost generation" of Americans whose future is less bright and more deadly. In fact, these lost souls are middle-age, white baby boomers who were found to have the highest mortality rate increase over the past 15 years of any demographic group compared to non-white Americans or to middle-age Europeans.

Angus Deaton, 2015 Nobel Prize for economics, and his wife, Anne Case, Ph.D., are both professors at Princeton University. Their paper, "Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife Among White Non-Hispanic Americans In The 21st Century," documents a trend of drugs, despair, alcohol and suicide among baby boomers.

The rising death rate is not driven by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes, but by a "quiet epidemic" of afflictions stemming from the economic recession, depression, substance abuse leading to alcoholic liver disease and suicides attributed to overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.

The Deaton-Case study suggests 488,500 opioid deaths would have been avoided in the period 1999-2013. "Only HIV/AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this," according to Deaton.

A 2014 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Opioid Painkiller Prescribing," found doctors prescribed 259 million prescriptions for opioids, equivalent to one for every American adult. Each day, 46 people die from prescription painkillers in the U.S. In 2012, the CDC also found there were 41,502 deaths due to drug poisoning in the U.S., of which 16,007 involved opioid analgesics and 5,925 involved heroin.

As well, 22 veterans in this country commit suicide daily, equivalent to more than 8,000 annually, many of whom suffer from chronic back pain, depression, neglect, unemployment and opioids — the usual factors of this "quiet epidemic."

Compelling evidence suggests the epidemic of back pain is now the No. 1 disabling condition in the nation, military, workplace and world with nearly $267.2 billion in total annual costs in 2008.

Back pain is now the leading indication for opioids and also appears to be the leading cause of suicides. One in three white middle-age Americans reported chronic joint pain and one in seven reported sciatica during the years 2011 to 2013. Social Security Administration records also show increased disability associated with musculoskeletal problems and mental health issues.

Opioid poisoning may simply be the cost of doing business for the medical-pharmaceutical industry. Prescription opioid painkillers for back pain brought in $17.8 billion and OxyContin alone made $3 billion in 2010. Inexplicably, obtaining opioids became more widespread when the FDA recently approved OxyContin for kids.

Big pharma's quest to cash in on opioids has become a national nightmare on small towns across America where local communities are left to pay the bills for prosecution, incarceration and hospitalization of these drug addicts.

Moreover, millions of families are left destroyed. As President Obama said, "This crisis is taking lives. It's destroying families and shattering communities all across the country. That's the thing about substance abuse; it doesn't discriminate. It touches everybody."

J.C. Smith is a doctor of chiropractic residing in Warner Robins.

This story was originally published November 17, 2015 at 9:39 PM with the headline "YOUR SAY: The quiet epidemic ."