Rx Pain Pills are the Real Gateway Drugs

[GoLeft TV]

From Ring of Fire:

According to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), first-time heroin use in the U.S. has increased 60 percent in the last ten years. The increase has been attributed to the inflating prices of opioid prescription painkillers, namely OxyContin, on the black market. Big Pharma mislead the medical community about the dangers of OxyContin by downplaying the risk of addiction when the drug was first introduced in the 1990s.

OxyContin is a potent oxycodone-based painkiller that was synthetically created by the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma. Increased demand and decreased supply, due to government crackdowns, on the black market are causing the pills to be more difficult to afford, more people are turning to heroin.

The spike in American heroin use has been most prevalent in the Northeast, especially in Suffolk County, New York, where heroin use has increased by 425 percent from 1996 to 2011. The Suffolk County Supreme Court also noted that the number of people admitted for substance abuse treatment for opioid painkillers increased 1,136 percent in the same period of time.

You can read the full article here at Ring of Fire.

[libodem]

1. Poppies in Afghanistan

And our interest in the CIA controlling the world's drug trade is part.of the equation. If a person has chronic unrelenting pain, pain meds don't get you high. All the effects go to pain control. Not everyone takes more and more. I think chronic.pain needs to be managed.

[BrotherIvan]

2. OxyContin has destroyed one family I know and is in the process of destroying another

The second man is now leaving his baby and toddler to move to a state where he has better access to the drug. He won't admit it, but there it is. He went to his doctor for ongoing shoulder pain. It wasn't debilitating, but was annoying. Instead of physical therapy or any number of treatments the doctor could have prescribed, he was given OxyContin. Now he is showing addicted behavior. Totally irresponsible on the part of the drug companies and physicians. That is why I, and it seems many people, no longer trust doctors. There is a conflict of interest, with big paydays winning out.

[kickysnana]

3. if you look at Americans 1950-1999 you see a whole different morale than now.

With people divided evenly by parties, lied to by big business through media and through schools and churches we ran smack into shock and awe of the designed transfer of wealth and power from the people of America to the elite. Zero tolerance, criminalizing descent and minor offenses, imprisoning thousands. Increasing the military at the expense of everything else. Taking the future by exporting jobs with bonuses, stealing investments including housing, torture, lies, NSA if you look at even the actors, the people who are paid to look good they do not have that golden glow Americans had when we had a future, health care, tolerance, compassion. Many of those that have fallen in this thing probably turn to something to survive.

Also they are not prescribing too many pills for pain, they are prescribing too few and have been for some time. But, the 10 minute doctor appointments do not allow for solving problems that lead to the pain. Insurance companies cannot measure pain with a test so Drs are stuck in hell between desperate suffering patients and insurance companies and their own administration helping them. Add to that the huge increase in making everything regarding chemical dependency punitive of course we have a problem but not treating pain is stupid and futile.

This has to stop. Doctors and pharmacists cannot be Narcs AND caregivers. Wanting pain relief is not the same as drug seeking and that is exactly what this is trying to convince you. We need to stop thinking we can read about some one in an article and diagnose them or label them and put the money into making this a golden place again where people want to live and flourish.

[MisterP]

5. it's very definitely a horned dilemma--it reminds me of the obesity surge

not just because America's getting more and more biochemicalized (as opposed to midcentury contamination by runoff and byproducts), but because the people most involved rely on what can pose a threat--everyone has to eat/dose once a day they face a sort of hypothalamic inferno; they need the potential danger to keep the overwhelming pain at bay

[hack89]

4. Opioid painkillers kill nearly 20,000 a year

From 1999 to 2010, the number of U.S. drug poisoning deaths involving any opioid analgesic (e.g., oxycodone, methadone, or hydrocodone) more than quadrupled, from 4,030 to 16,651, accounting for 43% of the 38,329 drug poisoning deaths and 39% of the 42,917 total poisoning deaths in 2010. In 1999, opioid analgesics were involved in 24% of the 16,849 drug poisoning deaths and 20% of the 19,741 total poisoning deaths.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6212a7.htm

[Lilyhoney]

6. New pain pill's approval: 'Genuinely frightening'

Just wait until the public gets a taste of this new pain med. It's called Zohydro and it is potent.



http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/26/health/zohydro-approval/