Opioid Abuse Epidemic in the United States : Analysis from the point of view of Societal and Institutional Risk

Narcotic opioids, which have been prescribed as painkillers, have become so prevalent across the U.S. that today deaths from their abuse surpass traffic deaths. In 2017, President Donald Trump declared a public health emergency as the “opioid crisis” over the spike in deaths from opioid abuse, including overdose. This issue has developed into a major social problem since the 1990s due to a combination of factors. In this paper, the author analyzes the development of the opioid abuse epidemic in the U.S. — how it broke out, expanded, was responded to, re-expanded and was eventually recognized as a national crisis — using a risk colonization framework based on societal and institutional risks. The paper aims to understand the process of expansion and its contributing factors in a more objective and comparable way