Opioid Crisis Research Paper

The Crisis

Elisha C. H. T. McGuckin English Department, Central Ohio Technical College ENGL-113 Mrs. Grimm February 26, 2024

Abstract This paper analyzes the issues and effects of the opioid crisis, as well as plausible solutions for the previously mentioned topic.

Introduction Since the year of 1996 the opioid crisis has been a massive threat to the lives of hundreds of thousands people in Ohio (Tackling, 2023) and just over 1 million worldwide, with the US in the number one place in ODs per capita. The opioid crisis is believed to have begun in 1999 with big pharmacies such as Rx pharmacies prescribing opioids at an all-time high (Tackling, 2023). This began with morphine and other pain killers. Eventually, …show more content…
Some factors in the rise of this crisis were overprescription, change in the opioid market, and due to the overprescription, greater demand. Though much of the blame for the drug trafficking is often placed on those who illegally import it into the USA via national borders, the majority of trafficked opioids are trafficked by legal citizens (Tackling, 2023). Though the crisis started with less harmful opioids, they have gradually become more and more potent to the point that one gram of a substance is equal to about 1 million pill units of morphine (Combating, 2023). As Gregory Nevanos, Deputy Assistant Director of the Illicit Trade, Travel and Finance Division of the Homeland Security Institution (HSI), stated, “The rise of fentanyl in the United States can be traced back to China’s large pharmaceutical industries,” defining that much of the opioid crisis can be attributed to China’s industries creating the products used to create the illicit substances which are then often sent to a lab in Mexico to be processed and create the final product, also leading to a massive supply of illicit substances (Hedegaard, Minio, & Warner After three major laws were

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