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Between 2012 and early 2017, I was part of a policy team at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that helped to advise then-Secretary Sylvia Burwell on a wide range of health policy topics, including the best available evidence to combat the opioid epidemic.
It was an important task. Drug overdose deaths claimed more than 52,000 lives in the U.S. in 2015 alone, with more than 33,000 from opioids. To put that in perspective, at the peak of the AIDS epidemic in 1995, the disease claimed 51,000 lives.
President Donald Trump today declared opioid abuse a nationwide public health emergency and said his administration will take aggressive steps to address the epidemic’s causes and effects.
“It is time to liberate our communities from this scourge of drug addiction,” he said in a speech at the White House. “I am directing all executive agencies to use every appropriate emergency authority to fight the opioid crisis.”
Three of four new cases in Colorado are among the 20- to 29-year-old age group, CHI analysis shows.
More than half a million Coloradans live in a county with few or no treatment options for people suffering from opioid addiction.
The nation is in the midst of an epidemic of opioid addiction and overdose deaths, and Colorado is no exception. Medication-assisted treatment, or MAT, is a proven way to fight this epidemic. It’s an evidence-based approach recommended by a wide range of respected scientific sources for the treatment of addiction to opioids, a category of drug that derives from the opium poppy and includes prescription pain pills as well as heroin.
This interactive dashboard and analysis explore substance use in Colorado’s high schools using data from the 2015 Healthy Kids Colorado Survey.
More than one of 15 (7.4 percent) Medicare prescriptions in Colorado is for opioids — prescription drugs such as codeine and oxycodone, data from 2014 show. That is 1.7 percentage points higher than the national rate.
This interactive dashboard and analysis explore marijuana in Colorado’s high schools using data from the 2015 Healthy Kids Colorado Survey.
The burning question about tobacco and its future in Colorado