The Opioid Epidemic In The United States
Creators: name: Johnson, Tristin
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020

description: I. Introduction Today, I will be doing a complete analysis about the opioid epidemic across the United States of America from 1999-2018. Throughout this presentation, I will be covering various analytics across several factors regarding the opioid epidemic in the United States, which include total deaths by opioids, the specific total deaths by opioid, the gender figures in absolute and relative figures, the youth deaths by opioids, the rate of deaths by demographic, and finally comparing the deaths due to opioid by race with the average household income by race. II. Gathering/Cleaning the Data I was able to gather the opioid overdose information courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the average household income by demographic information from the U.S. Census, and the population by demographic in the United States from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF, an American non-profit organization covering health policy analysis). The links to all of this information is below: CDC Opioid Overdose Data (1999-2018):https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db356.htm Household Income by Race: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html Population by Demographic in the U.S.: https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-raceethnicity/?dataView=1&amp;currentTimeframe=1&amp;selectedRows=%7B%22wrapups%22:%7B%22united-states%22:%7B%7D%7D%7D&amp;sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D III. Future Predictions While a majority of the data over the 20 year period has the number of overdose deaths due to opioids as increasing, there is a consistent decline from 2017 to 2018. This could be due to the fact that the awareness and negative effects opioids have become increasingly popular, meaning we can clearly see more and more people are overdosing on opioids, and hopefully this death count will begin to decline in the upcoming years. Among the youth, I believe that the youth figures will decrease over the next couple of years. This could be because, there have been a lot of youth celebrities overdosing on opioids in the last 2 years and has put young people on alert as they are becoming more afraid to try these opioids because of the high possibility they overdose. Regarding the gender figures, I believe that the gap between male and female overdoses will continue to grow as there are no signs of that gap decreasing. Furthermore, the demographics begin to tell a slightly more difficult story. There are very few declines in the rate of overdoses by race, which means there could be more deaths to come, especially with the sharp rise among Black and American Indian ethnicity groups. Also, looking at the average income against the total opioid overdoses by demographic, there is a clear correlation among the increase in salary and the increase in opioid deaths. This could be because since income has increased over the years, and since opioids are relatively expensive, people have the money to buy these opioids which then leads to more overdoses. IV. Conclusion With the functions and interactive experiences above, there are multiple different comparisons and analysis that can be conducted to begin to draw some conclusions about the opioid epidemic. The one opioid that stood out the most was synthetic narcotics (fentanyl and tramadol), which has been on the rise since 2014, and could be due to the fact that a lot of these opioids have been laced with synthetic narcotics as it only takes a small amount for someone to overdose. Overall, I learned a lot of information regarding the opioid epidemic here in the United States, and it has definitely made me more aware of the various factors that make up this epidemic. Looking at the total figures, the gender figures, the youth figures, and the demographic figures, it has most certainly opened my eyes to the epidemic and made me realize a lot of different things. It is a sad thing to see that a majority of these figures have just been increasing year after year. The only decline in overdose deaths was from 2017 to 2018 (the last year of data), which gives me some hope in our future to abolish this opioid epidemic.