More die from drugs than traffic accidents

Drug overdoses now outpace traffic accidents as the leading cause of injury-related death in 16 states, including Washington, as use of prescription painkillers continues to rise.

The continuing shift, reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), also reflects safer driving practices.

Nationwide, while traffic deaths still outnumber drug-related deaths approximately 45,000 to 39,000, they've fallen steadily over time — by about 6.5 percent from 1999 to 2006.

But at the same time, the CDC said, drug overdoses doubled, with most of the rise blamed on legally obtainable opiates.

The 2006 death rate for methadone alone was seven times the 1999 rate.

According to University of Washington researcher Caleb Banta-Green, ever since chronic pain was considered undertreated in the 1990s, use of opioids such as OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet has been on the rise, prescribed to one in five adults and one in 10 adolescents annually.

As prescriptions have risen, so, too, has abuse — among all age levels. One-tenth of Washington 10th-graders have reported using opiates to get high in the past few years. And more than half of those who sought drug treatment statewide in 2008 were young adults ages 18 to 29.

But at the same time, the median age of those who overdosed was 48. In King County, nearly 40 percent of those who overdosed were older than 50, an age when chronic pain is increasingly common.

In general, Banta-Green said, the deaths are a result of inappropriate use of prescription opioids with alcohol or other drugs — including frequently prescribed benzodiazepines such as Valium or Xanax. "Very rarely are they taking them exactly as prescribed," he said. In other cases, the drugs have been stolen from people to whom they were prescribed.

In 1997, opiate-related overdoses happened primarily in Seattle; in 2008, Banta-Green said, "they were all across the county."

In other words, drug overdoses were once tied to heroin use. Now, he said, "it's expanded really beyond the heroin-using population."

A study conducted by Group Health Cooperative found that a decade ago, a little more than 2 percent of adults took opiates daily, Banta-Green said. That figure is now 4 percent, which means one in 25 adults are taking such drugs every day.

"Think about the sheer volume, how many medicines are in people's homes," he said. "... The sheer number of meds out there is huge."

Washington joined the group of 16 in 2006, with 707 drug overdoses compared with 687 traffic-related deaths. According to epidemiologist Jennifer Sabel, of the state Department of Health, while traffic-related deaths have dipped only slightly since 1999, overdoses have risen dramatically, up from 403.

The number of states in which drug overdoses outpace traffic accidents as a cause of death is up from eight states in 2003 and 12 in 2005.

Along with Washington, the other 15 are Oregon, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Connecticut.