Drug OD deaths rise among women

For many decades, drugs of abuse were a menace that mostly threatened the lives of men. In 1999, fewer than 1 in 25,000 adult women in the United States died of a drug overdose, and childbirth was twice as deadly. No more. Drug overdoses have become a prodigious thief of female lives in the U.S. And they are increasingly claiming women’s lives deep into middle age, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the 70,237 fatal drug overdoses in the United States during 2017, 18,110 of the victims were women between the ages of 30 and 64, records from the National Vital Statistics System show. That’s up from 4,314 in 1999. Some of the steepest increases in fatality rates have been seen in women who may not fit the public’s expectations of drug abusers. For instance, the rate of drug overdose deaths among women ages 55 to 64 multiplied by a factor of five between 1999 and 2017, driven by a tenfold increase in the rate of prescription opioid deaths. The finding that women well beyond middle age are misusing prescription drugs, abusing illicit drugs and probably taking dangerous drug combinations is more than just a curiosity. Added to an 80 percent rise in suicide rates among 45to-64-year-old women since around the turn of the century, it suggests that daughters, wives, mothers and grandmothers are bearing greater strains than they have in the past.