Painkiller epidemic details is given below.
Explanation:
On average, 78 people a day die from heroin or painkiller overdoses in the USA. The two belong to a class of drugs known as opioids or opiates, and right now, the USA is in the midst of an opioid epidemic. In 2014, heroin and painkiller overdoses were responsible for 28,647 deaths. These numbers are comparable to HIV related deaths during the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s and 1990s. There is no getting around the problem.
Opioids/opiates are a class of drugs that bind to opioid receptors in the brain and throughout the body. Opiates are drugs derived from the opium poppy plant, and opioids are drugs synthetically created to produce the same effect. The effect of drugs attaching to opioid receptors is simple; it dulls a person’s perception of pain.
Until roughly 30 years ago, chronic pain was largely considered something that patients, especially older patients, simply had to endure. Both doctors and patients saw pain as a part of aging and of life, albeit a rather unfortunate part. Opioids, most notably morphine, were occasionally used as pain medicine, but only in the most extreme circumstances. War veterans with amputated limbs and cancer patients in their last months of life received short doses of narcotics. The circumstances, for these patients, were considered dire enough to warrant the risk of addiction.
But in the 1980s, both the public and doctors’ thinking began to change. Doctors began to argue in medical journals that all forms of chronic pain should be treated more aggressively, and that opioids were not addictive when prescribed for pain. The change in thinking continued through the 1990s as both doctors and patients became more and more eager to search for ways to relieve chronic pain symptoms.
Pharmaceutical companies funded non-profits, like the American Academy of Pain Management and the American Pain Society which, in turn, published studies on eliminating chronic pain through opioid painkillers. In order to incentivize prescriptions for their specific opioid painkillers, pharmaceutical companies actively marketed towards physicians and pharmacists.
And it worked. The same US GAO reports found that by 2002, doctors were prescribing 10 times more OxyContin than in 1997. The sales of that single drug alone made up 80 to 90% of Purdue’s revenues. In 2007, Purdue Pharma pled guilty in federal court to misleading the public about the risk of addiction to their drug and paid $634.5 million in fines.
The outlandish marketing practices used for OxyContin have somewhat died down since then. Companies are no longer allowed to market so intensely and directly to doctors. However, the practice continues indirectly, and the effects from the original marketing campaigns are still being felt. Despite our best efforts, pharmaceutical companies still heavily incentivize doctors to overprescribe what once were considered highly dangerous drugs.
Pharmaceutical companies worked to advance the idea that narcotics were the only answer to chronic pain.
Painkiller overprescription has collided forcefully with recent economic downturn. Overprescription made narcotics like OxyContin widely available. As health experts and people in the field of medicine began to realize the problems this had created, the Great Recession hit and tightened everyone’s purse strings. Many people could no longer afford the drugs they had unwittingly become physically dependent on and turned to heroin to avoid withdrawal.
