When most people think of drug overdose deaths, they think of overdoses from street drugs such as heroin and cocaine.
It would be more apt to think of the pills in our medicine cabinets.
New government figures show that the use of prescription narcotics – powerful opium-based painkillers that can be deadly when taken incorrectly – continues to skyrocket. Also, the number of overdose deaths involving painkillers has exploded to the point where fatal overdoses of drugs such as Vicodin, OxyContin and morphine now outnumber those caused by street drugs.
In December 2008, a Journal Gazette investigation showed that the use of narcotics was up dramatically in Indiana:
•Fentanyl use increased 744 percent in the 10 years ending in 2006
•Oxycodone use was up 712 percent
•Methadone use was up 2,061 percent – nearly double the national increase for methadone in that time period.
Now, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency statistics show that in 2007, the use of these drugs increased again, and once again Hoosiers' growing appetite for them outpaced the growth in the rest of the country.
In 2006, DEA figures showed methadone was being used at a rate of 2,384 grams per 100,000 people nationally; in 2007 that use leapt to 5,352 grams, a 125 percent increase.
I think that fits in well with my conjecture that difficult conditions raise the level of drug use.
It certainly explains the rise of heroin use in Vietnam during the war with a fairly swift decline once the vets returned home.
Now if we could switch those folks to pot (which has never caused an overdose death) we might be saving a few lives. But that shite is illegal.
BTW opiate users with access to pot report less opiate use even when opiate use doesn't go to zero.
On finding her positive for marijuana, her doctor informed her that she would have to reduce her cannabinoid level to zero. After a heart-to-heart talk, in which she explained to him how she had been able to reduce her opiate use to minimal levels thanks to medical cannabis
Yesterday in Long Beach I evaluated a 52 year old man who wanted to use medical marijuana for chronic low back pain. He fractured the 4th and 5th Lumbar vertebra in his back 10 years ago on a construction site and has been under the care of a “pain specialist” ever since. WHEN HE SHOWED ME THE PRESCRIPTION THAT HIS PAIN DOCTOR GAVE HIM FOR THE MONTHS OF SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER I JUST ABOUT FELL OUT OF MY CHAIR.
540 80MG OXYCONTIN with instructions to take 9 PER DAY!!!! He has been taking 9 per day for the last year.
Now he is my office looking for an alternative to oxycontin. In my experience patients can reduce or completely eliminate the use of opiates by medicating with cannabis. In most cases they can dramatically reduce the number they are using daily within a few weeks. Yes they have to medicate more than once throughout the day but most of these patients are NOT BEING PRODUCTIVE in their current state anyway. They are sitting at home popping pills and literally wasting their life away.
As physicians we take an oath that states “First do no harm” Since I have been discussing cannabis use with patients over the past 3 years I have realized that the preceding statement in the hippocratic oath has become for many doctors (if you read the fine print) ”First, do not harm… unless they have $500 cash”)
choff wrote:I thought Fentanyl produced a poor high, and junkies weren't so stupid as to use something that dangerous.
Junkies will use whatever relieves their pain that they can afford/get their hands on if they dont have an option.
"Saving" junkies from their addictions is counter-evolutionary, and rarely works. A junkie has to WANT to quit and be willing to do WHATEVER IT TAKES to accomplish that, without any inducements or other rewards offered. Until they are at rock bottom and ready to quit, most all attempts to save them will fail, and sometimes you have to let people kill themselves.
I certainly support the right to die as a valid choice of individuals.
I always had the impression that here on Europe those types of pain-killers are seen with too much fear by the drs.
6 month ago I had to suffer two operations in a row, and even being in the hospital and heavily controlled, they only gave me strong pain-killers for 3 days, and then switched to metamizol (I think it is not used in the USA) and paracetamol for the rest of my convalescence.
I can tell you this. The next days after those first 3 it was painful, and I asked many times for something with a bit more punch, but to no avail.
I think that there has to be some middle position. Don't give them away as if they were aspirins, but use them when necessary. I don't think I would have become dependent just for extending those 3 days to a week.
Hope don't need them again for a long while.
"The problem is not what we don't know, but what we do know [that] isn't so" (Mark Twain)