The Washington Post reported that white people between 45-54 years old are dying at a rate that has increased significantly since 1999, and they’re suggesting that it’s, at least in part, due to drug use and suicide. Since these are things we are concerned with every day at the Center for Effective Living, we thought the article was with sharing. And if you’re in the greater Cleveland area and recognize yourself or someone you love in the excerpt below, we hope you’ll reach out to us.
Case and Deaton were examining government statistics on death rates and illness when they discovered the spike in mortality for people ages 45 to 54 in the period between 1999 and 2013.
“We both were sort of blown off our chairs when looking at that,” Deaton said. He said they knew that most demographers would look at the numbers and say, “ ‘You’ve got to have made a mistake. That cannot possibly be true.’ ”
When they pored over the data, however, they found that mortality rates for this group had risen an average of a half percent per year since 1999, after falling an average of 2 percent annually for the 20 years before that. If mortality rates group had stayed on their steady downward course, a half-million more people would be alive today, they determined…
Their findings have been corroborated by other research. A report from the National Heroin Task Force established by the Justice Department puts the number of overdose deaths from legal and illegal drugs at 110 every day. The heroin death toll has quadrupled in the decade that ended in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A study in the journal JAMA Psychiatry last year reported that 90 percent of the people who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white. Three-quarters said they were introduced to heroin through the use of prescription drugs.