Experts: Officials missed signs of prescription drug crackdown’s effect on heroin use
From the article:
From the beginning, the U.S. government’s decade-long crackdown on prescription drug abuse has run an unsettling risk: that arresting doctors and shuttering “pill mills” would inadvertently fuel a new epidemic of heroin use.
Gil Kerlikowske, who took over as President Obama’s drug czar in 2009, said the connection between prescription drugs and heroin “was not on the radar screen” during most of Obama’s first term and that he “didn’t do everything I should have” to raise awareness of the growing heroin problem. Now, he said, heroin is a “much larger concern.”
Justice Department officials reject any direct linkage between the crackdown on prescription drugs and rising heroin use, although it was a Justice Department unit — the National Drug Intelligence Center — that warned that the campaign against illegal use of prescription drugs was fueling heroin use. The center, which closed in 2012, was separate from the unit employing prosecutors and agents who fight drug use.
Filed under: General Problems
Its so true. When a chronic pain patient is denied care by withholding their medication, they’ll do anything for relief, including turn to the streets if its the only alternative.
In Washington there does not seem to be any idea that whatever they do has consequences. Every problem they try to solve creates other problems. They have no idea about the costs involved in what they do. What will be the costs to American citizens on the recent change of Hydrocodone to a CII? Increased number of visits to physicians. Some of these patients will be elderly or disabled. They may have to pay someone to take them to the doc. There will the increased costs to patients, health insurance plans, and government programs for the increasing number of office visits. This does not even take into account the alternatives that people in pain will seek. Will they commit suicide? Will they switch to heroin? Have you ever had a severe toothache? Would you have done just about anything to get rid of the pain? This is the situation that chronic pain sufferers face.
*FACEPALM*