Why are we so silent as a nation on what prescribing opiate drugs are doing to this country?
From 1996 to now, prescriptions for Opiates has grown from a $45M business to a $3.1B business by 2010.
Deaths from overdoses in that same timeframe grew from 4,030 to 16,651.
The Shacketts’ story is hardly unique. Prescription opioid use has been on the rise in the U.S. since the late 1990s, and heroin has not been far behind. From 2001 to 2014, the rate of heroin-related fatal overdoses has increased sixfold. A recent CDC report found that more people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2014 than in any other year on record—and over 60 percent of those deaths came from opioids. And as the media coverage, town hall meetings and local legislative hand-wringing over the past 18 months have shown, things are only getting worse. A new heroin scourge has risen out of the ruins of the 2000s opioid craze, and, unlike previous incarnations in the late 1960s and ’70s, it’s no longer confined to the seedy alleyways of the nation’s big cities. This time it’s sweeping through working- and middle-class America. “It’s the guy standing behind you in Starbucks,” Donna Shackett says. “It’s your kid’s teacher. It’s your next-door neighbor.
In my little 2,000 person town that is on the outskirts of Portland, we’ve buried 3 kids between the ages of 20-24 this year for Heroin overdoses or related that were known acquaintances of our children.
Newsweek this past week had a great article summarizing all this pain & suffering, but is also highlighting that it is middle aged americans - both female and male, that are seeing death rates RISE as a result of overdoses.
In November 2015, two Princeton economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, published a report analyzing mortality rates among Americans from 1999 to 2013. Their findings violently overturned our fundamental expectations for life expectancy in 21st-century America: For 14 years, the mortality rate among white Americans age 45 to 54 rose, half a percent every year. According to Case and Deaton, if mortality rates had simply held steady at their 1998 number, there would have been 96,000 fewer deaths from 1999 to 2013. Further, if the mortality rates had continued to steadily decline as they had in the second half of the 20th century—and as is typical of industrialized countries—488,500 deaths could have been prevented over that 14-year period. As Deaton told The Washington Post, “Half a million people are dead who should not be dead.”
It’s simple really, doctors get paid huge sums to sell patients pain medication, the patient gets hooked, but can’t afford the prescription drugs, so they turn to Heroin because it’s the same effect at 1/10 the cost.
But hey, at least the big pharma’s are making money right? So who really cares?
Of course, while there is always a place for both triage and more stringent prescriber guidelines, such efforts won’t cut off these drugs at the source. And pharmaceutical companies like Purdue, Endo, Johnson & Johnson and Abbott Labs have little incentive to reduce the sales of their pain pills: They’ve been lavishly profiting from the opioid epidemic for nearly two decades. It’s also too early to tell how the opioid epidemic is affecting the livelihoods of men and women in their 20s and 40s. It may take years for us to fully comprehend the scope of its devastation. And there’s a good chance it’ll get worse before it gets better: In August, the FDA approved the use of OxyContin for children ages 11 to 16.