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US needs to invest 'tens of billions or hundreds of billions' to fight opioid epidemic
The goal of an opioid is to reduce pain, but the addictive drugs are creating pain for millions of families suffering through the crisis. Deaths from opioid overdoses number at least 42,000 a year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control.
"This is an epidemic that's been getting worse over 10 to 20 years," Caleb Alexander, co-director of Johns Hopkins Center for Drug Safety, told CNBC's "On The Money" in a recent interview. "I think it's important that we have realistic expectations about the amount of work that it will take and the amount of coordination to turn this steamship around," Alexander added.
[...] Alexander added: "The statistics are stunning. More than 2.1 million Americans have an opioid use disorder or opioid addiction" and he says the country needs to "invest tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars" to shore up the treatment system. He said patients should be able to access medications that "we know work to help reduce the cravings for further opioids."
Don't mention the Portugal model!
Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Attorney General is suing members of the family that runs Purdue Pharma:
Their family name graces some of the nation's most prestigious bastions of culture and learning — the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Guggenheim Museum, the Sackler Lefcourt Center for Child Development in Manhattan and the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Columbia University, to name a few.
Now the Sackler name is front and center in a lawsuit accusing the family and the company they own and run, Purdue Pharma, of helping to fuel the deadly opioid crisis that has killed thousands of Americans. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey took the unusual step of naming eight members of the Sackler family this week in an 80-page complaint that accused Purdue Pharma of spinning a "web of illegal deceit" to boost profits.
While prosecutors in more than a dozen other states hit hard by the opioid epidemic have sued Purdue Pharma, Healey is the first to name individual Sackler family members, along with eight company executives.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 18 2018, @06:44PM (3 children)
Wikipedia seems to imply you graph prescriptions and the abuse stats are just a couple years delayed.
The usual path seems to be legal pain killer possibly "free" with insurance, then addiction, then the insurance company "saves money" by cutting them off, then its street drugs, which leads to personal disaster.
Its interesting that the drugs biochemically seem to cause no ill effect even with very long term use, whats called the "crisis" is the result of the end of medical supervision "to save money" resulting in street drugs as a replacement. Now street drugs are a complete disaster for personal life, that is true.
You get your first hit for free from the nice doctor, and your last hit from Leon the H pusher on the street corner over there as your life and family are completely vaporized. But the drugs themselves biochemically speaking when taken under real supervision of a real doctor, are pretty harmless.
I guess the best analogy I can come up with, is imagine hospitals and emergency rooms have out free packs of cigs for people to smoke to help chill in the waiting room, and then everyone acts surprised when tens of millions die of lung cancer from smoking illegal cigs once they're addicted.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Monday June 18 2018, @07:42PM (2 children)
Perhaps we should look at what happened after WWI. Many soldiers then got heroine after being injured in combat. Quite a few ended up being addicted. They weren't terribly happy about needing a fix, but they were generally able to get what they needed fairly cheaply, and so lived productive lives after the war.
Much of the current "crisis" is based on an attempt to studiously avoid looking at why our society has gotten so good at producing people who feel so little hope for the future that shooting up and checking out looks like their best option.
Since everyone likes gamification these days, what happens when a game has too much grinding for too little progress? People rage quit.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday June 18 2018, @08:31PM (1 child)
Thank you for that analogy, it seems to fit well. The rage quit is a likely reason for school/mass shootings as well. People with meaning in their lives do not do these kinds of things.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday June 20 2018, @10:35PM
Agreed.