The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call

The opioid crisis is not an anomaly. Instead, it’s a self-inflicted wound, driven by a catastrophically dysfunctional health care system, leading to what has become the largest public health crisis in 100 years. Fortunately, proven antidotes exist — all created and spearheaded by forward-looking citizen leaders and employers. It’s time to scale these solutions nationwide, stop the crisis in its tracks and move us light years closer to solving the larger disaster that is our health care system.

As you read this, countless people are leaving clinics and hospitals with over 30-day supplies of opioids for lower back pain, and other diagnoses for which opioids have little evidence of helping. Further, people are receiving opioid prescriptions for procedures where evidence-based medicine doesn’t justify such as many spinal procedures and asymptomatic wisdom tooth removal.

We need to mobilize the resources necessary to help those already enslaved by opioid use disorders. At the same time, we also need to turn off the enormous flow of people becoming addicted. Only by traveling upstream to stop addiction before it starts will we ever clean up the opioid crisis–and prevent future floods of addiction.

In The Opioid Crisis Wake-Up Call, Dave Chase explores the already-existing solutions to the largest public health crisis in a 100 years, updating and expanding on the content and themes from his 2017 bestseller, The CEO’s Guide to Restoring the American Dream. Here he uncovers the upstream fixes designed to stop the crisis at its source. Chase’s message is this: resolving the opioid crisis, at the CEO, citizen, and community level, brings us miles closer to fixing the systemic failures of U.S. health care.