A Scoping Review of Drug Epidemic Models.

Wei Wang,Zuhong Lu,Sifen Lu,Caiping Sun,Haoxiang Tang,Pai Zheng,Yi Bai,Biao Wang,Yulin Kang

doi:10.3390/ijerph19042017

Abstract

The phenomenon of drug epidemics has been a global issue in the past decades, causing enormous damages to the physical and mental health of drug users and social well-being. Despite great efforts to curb drug epidemics at the governmental or social level, the total number of drug users has still been on the rise in recent years, along with illicit production and trafficking around the world. Inspired by dynamical epidemic models of infectious disease, a flourishment of promising results has been observed in the exploration of drug epidemic models. In this review, we aim to provide a scoping review of all existing drug epidemic modeling studies, and it has been shown that most studies focused on analyses of theoretical behaviors of the model systems, lacking emphasis on practical applications in real settings. We found that the drug epidemic models were characterized by a longer time scale, no incubation period, no significant prevention vaccines interfered, and population specificity. This review could assist policymakers and public health workers in gaining deeper insights into modeling tools, and help modelers improve their works, thus narrowing gaps between mathematical epidemiology and public health studies.

Highlights

Introduction published maps and institutional affilThe phenomenon of drug abuse, which involves the consumption of illicit drugs or narcotics and nonmedical use of prescription drugs, has become one of the major issues threatening the safety and sustainability of human society in the 21st century
The identified drug epidemic models were mostly developed by mathematicians instead of epidemiologists or public health specialists, and a lot of attention was paid to the investigation of the theoretical behaviors of the model systems, including basic reproduction number, feasible region or uniform persistence, local and global asymptotic stability, as well as uncertainty or sensitivity analysis
We find that the dynamics of the drug epidemic have some specific properties: (1) Its time span is relatively long, and the prevalence of drugs is generally measured in years

Summary

Introduction

The phenomenon of drug abuse, which involves the consumption of illicit drugs or narcotics and nonmedical use of prescription drugs, has become one of the major issues threatening the safety and sustainability of human society in the 21st century. According to the 2019 World Drug Report released by United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), approximately 271 million people, which constituted 5.5% of the global workingage population (15–64 years), had used drugs in 2016 [1]. In terms of drug type, opioids remained the most lethal group, which resulted in around 66% of overdose-related deaths worldwide in 2017 [1]. The level of manufacture and trafficking of conventional drugs such as cocaine and cannabis remained high, and that of synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine and MDMA soared in recent years. Some 35 million people suffered from drug use disorders and required treatment around the world, and the death toll iations

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