By Glenn Farley & Kamryn Brunner

CSI estimates that the costs of the epidemic in Arizona reached an all-time high last year: $58 billion. This staggering figure includes not only hospital, law enforcement, and other public service costs of dealing with this crisis, but also loss of quality of life and productivity amongst those suffering with addiction.

The costs of this crisis have continued rising due to ongoing medical and other price inflation, law enforcement strains, the severity of fentanyl relative to other opioids, and the continued crisis on Arizona’s southern border enabling the primary pathway for fentanyl into America.

While the roots of the opioid crisis go back to the mid-90’s, its severity in terms of both human and social costs didn’t really take off until after 2015. This surge is attributable to the particular severity of fentanyl abuse, its low cost, and its relatively high availability. An unfortunate fact of three independent but concurrent policy changes whose roots can be traced to the late-2010’s – the overprescribing and subsequent crackdown on prescription drugs, the relaxation of criminal enforcement of America’s drug laws, and the collapse in security along the border with Mexico – has been to enable both supply and demand for fentanyl and other illegal opioids. This experiment in hindsight was clearly a failure.

Over the last decade, fatal opioid overdoses in Arizona have more than doubled. Seizures of fentanyl and other opioids inside Arizona remain at record levels. The DEA has identified the greater Phoenix area – whose violent crime is up about 50% over the past decade – as a central distribution hub for fentanyl into the greater United States.

This update to CSI’s  2022 study of what led to this crisis, and how it has continued evolving over the past two years, continues to be about not repeating the mistakes of the past and better-informing policy going forward.

Key Findings

• CSI estimates that the cost of the fentanyl crisis to Arizona’s economy today is $58 billion – for context, the annual GDP of the state of Arizona is $521 billion. In 2017, the CDC estimated the national opioid epidemic cost nearly $1 trillion – or $22 billion in Arizona alone. But since then, the problem has only gotten worse.

• While opioid-related fatal overdoses appear to have peaked, they remain near all-time highs; declines have been modest and it is premature to assume success in dealing with this crisis. In fact, despite opioid-related deaths in Arizona falling last year, CSI estimates the cost of this epidemic reached a new high.

• Total seizures of feal to the current crisis.

• In 2015, Arizona’s Department of Health Services reported 41,400 opioid-related encounters by Arizona hospitals, resulting in $305 million in encounter costs. By 2019, though, encounters had risen to 56,600 (+372019[i] to more than 29,200 pounds today[ii] – a 320% increase. Given that as little as 2 mg of pure fentanyl can be fatal, DEA seizures in Arizona alone lntanyl in the United States by the DEA have increased from approximately 6,800 pounds in ast year were enough to kill every Arizonan 14 times over. Because it is a border state, Arizona is centr%) but encounter costs had increased a staggering 120% (to $676 million).

Phoenix: Common Sense Institute Arizona, 2024. 18p.