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No you are wrong. People are prescribed opioids for pain. And yes many get hooked. When the pills run out they turn to heroin which has the same affect. When my husband had toe surgery, he was given a 30 day supply of opioids with a refill. He took one and hated it. He just went to Advil after that. When I had knee surgery I was given the same prescription. I hated it as well. But many love the high they get from it and just want more after the pills run out. So no, it’s not bs.
>>>>>>>he was given a 30 day supply of opioids with a refill.
That was then, natalie. This is now. If your husband went to that same doctor today with his leg hanging off the doctor wouldn't give him anything stronger than Ibuprofen, double strength if he's lucky.
I was watching a documentary on the current heroin/fentanyl crisis going on in Florida. A state official said, "We anticipated when we shut down the pill mills in 2010 that there would be a spike in heroin deaths. What we didn't anticipate was how large it would be." According to stats, in 2016, there were 2,798 opioid-related overdose deaths*** in Florida. That's roughly 7.5 per day and one cop in one city says he responds to about 8-9 calls a day for OD's.
Let's analyze this for a moment: the pill mills are shut down, good thing. Then doctors and pharmacies are scared stiff by the DEA threats to yank their licenses if they prescribe/fill opioids, bad thing. Dr. Memet Oz said 80% of heroin users started on prescription opioids. That means the heroin epidemic should gradually be declining by roughly 80% as these former pillheads get used to life without prescriptions, right? Wrong, the heroin epidemic is skyrocketing. Seems like shutting down opiate prescriptions, far from being a smart thing actually turned out to be the dumbest thing the governments could have done if they really wanted to stop this heroin crisis. What am I missing here?
The typical heroin addict is a white male, in his early 20's, with a history of using drugs for recreational purposes.
Dr. Oz is wrong. Every single person I know of that is an opiate addict never once had them prescribed to them. 99% of them are heroin users from the beginning and the other 1% who started with pills got them off the street for recreational purposes. Now, ALL of the people I know who had opiates prescribed, not a single one ever became an addict who moved on to heroin. That BS is a myth.
DR Oz said 80% of heroin addicts started with prescription opioids.
He did not say the Heroin addict was prescribed a opioid.
I have volunteered on and off for years in a hospital detox/ treatment facility. I have yet to encounter anyone whose first toe in the Heroin pond began with Heroin. All have a history of using a variety of drugs for recreational purposes. A heck of a lot of them used opioids for recreational purposes. They bought them off the street.
I have yet to come across anyone with no history of recreational drug use who was prescribed opioids who then jumped to heroin. This does not mean there arn't some who did- just not common.
Street opioids are more costly than heroin and often more challenging to procure.
DR Oz said 80% of heroin addicts started with prescription opioids.
He did not say the Heroin addict was prescribed a opioid.
I have volunteered on and off for years in a hospital detox/ treatment facility. I have yet to encounter anyone whose first toe in the Heroin pond began with Heroin. All have a history of using a variety of drugs for recreational purposes. A heck of a lot of them used opioids for recreational purposes. They bought them off the street.
I have yet to come across anyone with no history of recreational drug use who was prescribed opioids who then jumped to heroin. This does not mean there arn't some who did- just not common.
Street opioids are more costly than heroin and often more challenging to procure.
They should have known restricting opioid painkillers was going to backfire and/or not work.
Many addicts are now getting opioid pills over the internet, the online pharmacy I get my Suboxone from now, does not require a prescription or doctor office visit, you only have to electronically 'sign' that you did see a doctor and you do have a legitimate prescription...I could have just lied and still gotten the medicine. I imagine many other online pharmacies operate like this. It has saved me a bundle though, its MUCH cheaper online.
I agree with you, bones. The vast majority of people who were prescribed opiates for their pain never abused or sold them and acted responsibly in following how their doctors told them to use the pills. So they got dependent, yes but not addicted. What happened was that kids started stealing the pills out of their parents'/friend's parents' cabinets. That's where the trouble began. But the Feds took a sledgehammer to the problem by banning the prescribing of nearly all opiates by scaring the doctors and pharmacies out of their wits with threats of jail and loss of license. So since 2016 sales of opiates has dropped to nearly 0. Naturally in this climate of severe restriction of legal opiates sales of heroin and illegal fentanyl would skyrocket as addicts and pain patients turned to dealers to get heroin to manage their pain or just to get high.
At least when prescription opiates were legal the government had control on the amount of opiate in the pills. Now in an illegal market people don't know what kind of crap is in these baggies and pressed pills. Could be heroin, or heroin laced with fentanyl or heroin laced with fentanyl AND carfentanyl. Deaths are on track to double in the coming years from illegal opiates from where they were pre-2016 when opiates were okay to prescribe.
So how did the government help the current crisis except to make it worse? The burden of costs for increased law enforcement, increased paramedic responses, ambulance transporting to ER and ER treatment for OD all fall on local governments which are stretched to the breaking point. But the Feds don't seem to care about the financial burden they are placing on local governments. They continue to instruct the DEA to threaten and arrest any doctors who prescribe opiates. That's what I mean by "Did the Federal government create this heroin crisis?"
No, the federal government did not create this “crisis”. Addicts created the aforementioned problems and all the additional problems that arise with the abandonment, neglect and abuse that their families go through.
Addicts love no one. All they care about is the next dose.
This “crisis” won’t end until people take the first step: stop enabling the cretins.
When hospitals began conducting marketing surveys in the early 1990s, it was impossible for hospitals not to see the overwhelming correlation between hospital ranking and level of pain.
Those patients who experienced minimal pain in hospital rated the hospital highly, giving a score of "excellent" and would recommend the hospital to others.
Those patients who experienced high levels of pain in hospital rated the hospital very poorly, and would not recommend the hospital to other patients, which is not good for the hospital's reputation.
Those patients who experienced more than minimal pain, but not excruciating pain in hospital gave the hospital a mediocre rating, which is not good for a hospital's reputation, either.
You, and you alone, forced hospitals to initiate pain management protocols, because hospitals cannot endure bad reputations from patients claiming the hospital wouldn't do anything about their pain levels.
In Cincinnati, Providence Hospital and Deaconess Hospital don't exist anymore, because they had reputations as horrid places where you languish in pain, because the medical staff didn't give a damn if you were in pain and wouldn't do anything about it. And, yes, people talk and they tell others about their bad experiences. The data consistently shows that if someone has a bad experience with any business including the healthcare business, they will tell seven people, but if they have a good experience, they'll only tell one other person about it.
Since pain can only be managed through the use of pharmaceuticals, the call went out, and drug companies responded, with Oxycontin being introduced in 1996.
Things went downhill from there.
Yes, it was egregious that companies like Perdue Pharmaceuticals claimed Oxycontin was not addictive, but even if they had not hidden that fact, people would still be using Oxycontin, because there are few alternatives.
If hospitals and doctors had known of the addictive properties of Oxycontin -- and all opioid-based drugs are inherently addictive --- would they have managed the situation better?
Maybe, then again, maybe not.
^^^ This.^^^
I got my medical license in 1992, when we were still handing out morphine with eyedroppers. Medical training throughout the 1980s was to restrict the use of opiates so that no one was going home a junkie. I was on the tail end of that medical generation.
In the 1990s, medical training changed drastically. We started treating pain as a disease, much the same way Maryland started treating trauma as a disease (they called it "The Maryland Way"). We were supposed to get ahead of the patient's pain and keep them as pain-free as possible. All the opiates got to play; morphine drips in the hospitals and later dilaudid, demerol, vicodin, T-3s - everyone was going home on something. I even saw fentanyl lollipops for the kids. Then Perdue Pharma came to the table with a longer lasting pain killer called extended release oxycontin. When used as directed, it could keep the patient pain free all day. Unfortunately, if it was misused (crushed), it got the patient really high, but for just a short while and addiction set in almost immediately. Before long, everyone was going home a junkie. But they sure didn't feel any pain...
(For all of you who think the government was complicit with or beholden to Big Pharma, it was the FDA's Special Prosecutions Unit that busted Purdue Pharma - using the company's own scientific data.)
In the 70s, all the heroin junkies we saw in the morgue were the dregs of society. By 2005, all the heroin junkies were suburbanites whose prescriptions had run out. Mexican narcotraffickers were helpful enough to spike their heroin and cocaine with cheap, Chinese fentanyl, which in my day was about 80 times more potent than plain old heroin. That only added to the addictions and fatalities.
When the problem finally got big enough to attract attention, the government responded. Although I retired years ago, my understanding now is that prescribing anything more than a 30 day supply of pain meds will get you audited and possibly disciplined (except hospice patients). Now the medical industry is looking for non-opioid pain killers, and no doubt some pharma company will come up with an effective one someday.
But be careful what you wish for. Look at history. In the 1800s, we wanted to wean people off methadone, so a pharma company invented something called heroin. A hundred years later we used methadone to wean people off heroin. During the 1990s, patients wanted no pain, and they got it. The consequences of getting what they wished for was addiction. Whatever gets invented to solve this problem will undoubtedly have its own unwanted consequences.
The amount of heroin available is a byproduct of the prescription opiate crisis, subsequent increased regulation, and criminals filling the gap that the pills left for addicts.
That availability and it's low cost compared to other drugs, in addition to it's potency and availability to be snorted, has led to more and more young people using it and become addicted.
So while new addicts might not have started with the pills, the market is flooded with heroin because of the initial addicts who were created by the pills.
It' all traces back to Perdue Pharma and Oxycontin. Poster above said perdue got "busted". They became billionaires and no one went to jail. Got a big fine but they were still billionaires. I don't call that getting "busted", it's a slap on the wrist. They should be in jail like any street level dealer for what they did to this country.
I got my medical license in 1992, when we were still handing out morphine with eyedroppers. Medical training throughout the 1980s was to restrict the use of opiates so that no one was going home a junkie. I was on the tail end of that medical generation.
In the 1990s, medical training changed drastically. We started treating pain as a disease, much the same way Maryland started treating trauma as a disease (they called it "The Maryland Way"). We were supposed to get ahead of the patient's pain and keep them as pain-free as possible. All the opiates got to play; morphine drips in the hospitals and later dilaudid, demerol, vicodin, T-3s - everyone was going home on something. I even saw fentanyl lollipops for the kids. Then Perdue Pharma came to the table with a longer lasting pain killer called extended release oxycontin. When used as directed, it could keep the patient pain free all day. Unfortunately, if it was misused (crushed), it got the patient really high, but for just a short while and addiction set in almost immediately. Before long, everyone was going home a junkie. But they sure didn't feel any pain...
(For all of you who think the government was complicit with or beholden to Big Pharma, it was the FDA's Special Prosecutions Unit that busted Purdue Pharma - using the company's own scientific data.)
In the 70s, all the heroin junkies we saw in the morgue were the dregs of society. By 2005, all the heroin junkies were suburbanites whose prescriptions had run out. Mexican narcotraffickers were helpful enough to spike their heroin and cocaine with cheap, Chinese fentanyl, which in my day was about 80 times more potent than plain old heroin. That only added to the addictions and fatalities.
When the problem finally got big enough to attract attention, the government responded. Although I retired years ago, my understanding now is that prescribing anything more than a 30 day supply of pain meds will get you audited and possibly disciplined (except hospice patients). Now the medical industry is looking for non-opioid pain killers, and no doubt some pharma company will come up with an effective one someday.
But be careful what you wish for. Look at history. In the 1800s, we wanted to wean people off methadone, so a pharma company invented something called heroin. A hundred years later we used methadone to wean people off heroin. During the 1990s, patients wanted no pain, and they got it. The consequences of getting what they wished for was addiction. Whatever gets invented to solve this problem will undoubtedly have its own unwanted consequences.
How do you explain the numerous cities and states that have major heroin epidemics going on right now? How is all this heroin coming in, reaching its destination, so CONSISTENTLY?
Do you realize how many acres of poppies would be needed to keep an entire nation supplied, to the point of it being an epidemic?!!!
I watched this happen when I was abusing pain pills, back in 2012, as soon as the opioid laws went into effect, dealers were sitting on so much heroin, they were having trouble getting rid of it. a couple of my 'connections' were amazed at the amount of heroin they were having pushed on them, they were being told to sell cheap, just to people tolerant...I have to say, it worked GREAT, I havent used in almost 3 years, but the last time, heroin was around $150. per gram!!!!
This was definitely a conspiracy...DEA and the cartels are the two responsible parties imo, everything the DEA does or has a hand in, ultimately benefits the drug cartels business. The pharma companies were a threat to them, and they used DEA to get rid of the competition, its pretty simple if you look at what happened and when.
No, the federal government did not create this “crisis”. Addicts created the aforementioned problems and all the additional problems that arise with the abandonment, neglect and abuse that their families go through.
Addicts love no one. All they care about is the next dose.
This “crisis” won’t end until people take the first step: stop enabling the cretins.
So let me understand what you are implying, nurse. You're saying "Take away all the prescription opiates. Arrest the doctors who prescribe them to treat chronic pain patients. Let the chronic pain patients suck it up and learn to live with the pain. Then this problem of addicts dying will disappear." Is this actually what you are telling us?
Last edited by thrillobyte; 10-26-2018 at 08:13 PM..
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