What might help combat opioid overdose deaths? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:03 — 1.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Over 100,000 people died in 2022 because of drug overdoses, with the majority of them using illegal opioids in ways other than injection, the latest CDC data shows. Substance use disorder expert Michael Fingerhood at Johns Hopkins says while interdiction seems like an obvious solution, the root cause is much more fundamental.

Fingerhood: I think that we should do some to prevent the influx, so cheap and easy to have on the street but I think that the prevention part is is so key, is to understanding how people turn and more and more over the last, especially since COVID related to almost probably every substance, I think a lot of addiction is a disease of loneliness and isolation. Most people who use eventually use alone and that's why they die of overdose too.  :29

The US surgeon general concurs that loneliness is epidemic, with a host of consequences. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.