AG Jeff Landry helps launch ‘End the Epidemic’ campaign against opioid abuse

AG Jeff Landry helps launch ‘End the Epidemic’ campaign against opioid abuse

http://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/politics/article_1aa8d318-1a49-11e7-98ee-5788230bed3a.html

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry has teamed up with the Louisiana Ambulance Alliance and a pharmaceutical company to raise awareness about the growing opioid epidemic.

Landry on Wednesday announced the launch of the “End the Epidemic LA” campaign, which will include a website (EndTheEpidemicLA.org), advertisements and community outreach efforts.

The website includes information for users, parents, educators, employers and others in an effort to offer a “resource for anyone wishing to learn more about how to avoid opioid addiction, spot opioid addiction in others and treat opioid addiction.”

 People can go to the site to request information or schedule a guest speaker on the dangers of opioid abuse.

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 “From the big cities to our rural towns, no community in Louisiana is immune to the opioid abuse epidemic,” Landry said in a statement. “Opioid abuse has taken the lives of too many of our children, parents, neighbors, and co-workers. We hope that End the Epidemic LA will assist in the reduction of opioid misuse, abuse, and overdose.”

The outreach effort is being paid for by Amphastar, a drug maker known for its generic naloxone, a drug that can quickly reverse opioid overdoses. Amphastar and other naloxone makers have come under scrutiny for the rising costs of their life-saving medication amid the rise of opioid abuse in recent months.

Louisiana has the sixth-highest opioid pain reliever-prescribing rate in the country, according to analysis from IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics over a year-long period through June 30, 2016. It found that there were 102.3 opioid prescriptions for every 100 people, when counting new prescriptions and prescribed refills. The national average was 69.5 prescriptions for every 100 people during that period.

 “When Attorney General Landry’s office brought this partnership opportunity to us, we immediately recognized the opportunity to deliver more pre-hospital care albeit in a non-traditional manner,” Ambulance Alliance CEO Donna Newchurch said in a news release. “The ultimate beneficiaries of this partnership are the citizens we serve daily.”

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The state’s drug overdose rate currently outpaces the national average, fueled by the rise in prescription opioid abuse and the use of illicit opioids, like heroin, and synthetic black-market opioids, like fentanyl. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention placed Louisiana had the 19th highest age adjusted opioid OD rate in 2015.

For the first time in New Orleans’ history, deaths from accidental drug overdoses surpassed murders last year, attributed largely to the increase in the abuse of heroin and other opioids.

On Tuesday, Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, announced three anti-opioid abuse bills that are among his priority legislation for the session that begins Monday.

 

4 Responses

  1. This entire crisis is a sham and a fraud on the people of this country. No doubt in my mind that the opioids have been put on the street for decades deliberately by the CIA just like was done in the 60’s with LSD and mind altering drugs. Don’t forget Fast & Furious. Our darn government causes these “crisis” effects with phony math and twisted calculations. And this is all done to push some agenda they have cooked up for months and years prior to causing the event.
    This time they have gone too far in deliberately causing Americans in chronic pain or general pain to be tortured and in pain needlessly due to their bureaucratic rules that are inhumane and do nothing to curb the continued drug abuse by the true drug addicts. Pain patients are not drug addicts and rarely get addicted because they are not getting a “high” from the medication but having their pain managed quite well in most cases. Severe suffering and the ability to reduce or stop it is a major benefit of the physician/patient relationship. Doctors know the difference in pain patients and drug addicts. Let doctors do their jobs and keep your noses out of that process. Bureaucrats are not physicians and I want you to stay out of my healthcare process of prescribing or not prescribing my medications.

  2. They can start by using their own language. Start saying “raise awareness about the growing illicit opioid epidemic” words are extremely powerful, especially when repeated over and over

  3. Many of us chronic pain sufferers are now living in a world we don’t understand, and wonder why this over-the-top focus on deaths related to overdose from “narcotic” street drugs be applied to us. Especially when the health effects arising from unwarranted reduction, abrupt discontinuation, and undisclosed toxic reconfigurations, have led to suicides, elimination in ability to function, and increase for additional health services needed due to the stress, diminished quality of life, and barriers to needed peace and relaxation associated from the targeting of chronically ill patients on Medicare doesn’t make sense, is unsustainable, and only adding harm and increased risk to the escalating situation it claims to address.
    My repeated complaints concerning misrepresentation, authenticity, and related health issues and costs, [such as heavy metal- poisoning requiring medical attention], has not been addressed. I recently reviewed my sisters’ abnormal blood-test results, and noticed that the heavy metals request wasn’t performed and stated as unnecessary by the FDA without any further explanation.
    I plan to contact the Attorney General regarding this dangerous decision.

    • I am in the same situation whereby as a chronic pain patient I am now having my medications simply withdrawn a dose at a time. At my next appointment I will be reduced to perhaps six hours a day of pain relief. I have now had to make an appointment with a surgeon in the hopes that maybe I will have less pain if I go thru horrible back surgery. I had back surgery in the past and it was nothing short of torture. I received two months of pain meds and simply dropped by the surgeon with nothing more than an NSAID which I have taken for over 20 years now. It is not a tough pain killer but aids in lesser pains.

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