Schmitt rates Mostly True on claim about opioid deaths

As cases of opioid use disorder continue to wreak havoc across the U.S., many states have taken steps to address the issue. Missouri is one of more than 30 states that brought a lawsuit against opioid manufacturers, alleging the companies misrepresented the dangerous and addictive nature of the drugs.

Speaking at a roundtable discussion about the opioid epidemic Nov. 25, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who inherited Missouri’s lawsuit when he took office, said, "You have literally 140 people dying every day of opioid-related overdoses. That’s like a passenger plane going down every day of every week of every month of every year of every decade."

Here’s what we found: He’s off by about 10.

Preliminary data for last year shows fewer deaths.

When asked about where Schmitt found the statistic, Chris Nuelle, the attorney general’s press secretary, said that opioid-related research can fluctuate, so it can be hard to get exact numbers. He also noted that Schmitt has often attributed 130 deaths per day to opioids, though Nuelle believes the 140 number is still accurate.

Nuelle pointed to a National Institute on Drug Abuse article that attributed more than 130 deaths per day and provided the link to a U.S. News & World Report story that analyzed opioid data, but did not indicate the number of deaths due to opioid overdoses each day at all.

The most reliable and most recent data available on drug and opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s most recent data was released in 2018 and analyzes 2017 drug and opioid overdose deaths.

In 2017, there were 70,237 drug overdose deaths in the United States. Of those deaths, 47,600 — or 67.8% of all drug overdose deaths — involved some type of opioids whether natural, synthetic or semisynthetic.

When you break these statistics down into deaths per day, there were approximately 192 drug overdose deaths each day on average in 2017. Of those 192 deaths, about 130 each day involved an opioid. This statistic does not match up exactly with Schmitt’s claim that there are 140 opioid-related deaths daily in the U.S.

Jasmine Reed, a public affairs specialist at the CDC, said in an email that the 130 daily deaths from opioid overdoses is an average calculated by dividing the total number of opioid overdoses in the year by the number of days in a year. She said this means the number is not an absolute figure, but that it is more accurate to say there are 130 opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. each day than it is to say there are 140.

If the number of opioid overdose deaths continued growing steadily, as it has in past years, the number of deaths each day in 2019 might, in fact, be 140 or even exceed 140. However, this is not yet known because the final counts of overdose deaths for 2018 and 2019 have not been released.

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