Male Labor Market in Decline as Opioid Crisis Emerges
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The United States Labor Force is being threatened by the looming opioid crisis the country has been facing.
Opioid abuse is usually closely related to workforce problems, largely because their prescriptions are more often than not caused by workforce related injuries. This gateway often leads to a counterintuitive end result, as opioid users have been shown to miss twice as many days of work as people with addictions to other drugs, according to the National Safety Council and NORC at the University of Chicago.
In an interview with CNN, Goldman economist David Mericle said "The opioid epidemic is intertwined with the story of declining prime-age participation, especially for men."
40 percent of unemployed men aged 25-54 report that pain prevents them from working on a full-time job that they are qualified for, statistics observed in a study published by Former White House economist Alan Krueger.
The opioid crisis is an epidemic that is taking the North American landmass by storm, with America taking the grunt of the damage. In 2019, the United States is reported to have suffered from 49,860 overdose deaths, while Canada dealt with 6,214 in the following year.
Pharmacists watch daily, as customers walk into their businesses in the middle of the day, asking for a new refill of their opioid prescriptions. A pharmaceutical survey, headed by Meldon Kahan, an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto, was conducted in Ontario, and revealed that 86% of surveyed pharmacists, reported that they were concerned about the wellbeing of several or many of their patients who were prescribed opioid medication. Their most common concerns included observations related to patients coming in early for prescription refills, suspected double-doctoring, and requests for “replacement doses” for lost medication. Furthermore, of those surveyed, 36% reported that at least 1 patient was intoxicated from opioids while visiting their pharmacies within the past year.
The concerning nature of opioid abuse cannot be understated, as its effects have been shown to be more lethal than alcohol abuse, despite it being less prevalent.
As the opioid crisis lingers in American society, more evidence has become available to its impact on the labor market. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has stated that from 1999 to 2010, despite Americans not reporting any increase of pain in this span of time, U.S. sales of opioid painkillers rose four times. The CDC even concluded that as of 2013 so many opioids had been prescribed that every American adult could have had his or her own bottle of pills.
Mericle, fond of the impact of the opioid crisis, mentions that the ongoing epidemic has and will create "significant costs both to employers and the public sector."
