They claim that one person dies of a drug overdose – all drugs.. not just opiates every 19 MINUTES… and they claim that is a epidemic..
HOWEVER… one person dies EVERY MINUTE from the use/abuse of Alcohol/Nicotine.. but that does not meet our society’s definition of a EPIDEMIC ??
Filed under: General Problems
Based on your figures of one death every 19 minutes…I assume that’s about 3 people/hour and 72 people per day …do you have a reference for this or anything that talks about how these figures are actually misleading the public into believing these deaths are all coming from from legal prescription drugs and not all drugs whether legal, illegal, street drugs, etc?
Or do you feel this is well enough covered in this report I’ve shared excerpts from (the Journal of Pain and Palliative Care Study) I have referenced here as they say Obama tweeted in 2015 that “120 people per day are dying daily from drug overdoses mostly involving legal prescription drugs. “ and yet the truth apparently is that when they come up with these statistics, we discover that they are combining every drug related death, but alcohol, OTC, legal and illegally obtained prescription drugs as well as street drugs such as heroin.
It’s remarkable that we don’t have more accurate statistics as the public are getting the impression that people who are taking prescription drugs are dying from them and there’s nothing that could be further from the truth as more often than not, people who are taking prescription MEDICATIONS (even the word drug has negative connotation) are taking them to manage pain and I think it is a travesty that the bad behavior of a certain percentage of “abusers” is causing legitimate patients to be caught in the fall out and being treated like addicts or potential addicts.
Why does it take a 10 page scientific report to get to the bottom of this? Don’t you think that is the point they are making but it’s written in such scientific language, it’s hard to translate into plain English? Do you think this report makes it clear ? By virtue of the Title, (Negative outcomes of unbalanced opoid policy supported by clinicians, politicians, and the media) isn’t their whole message about the unintended consequences from these new CDC or is it the DEA guidelines?
I have been working on my questions I wrote above and would edit what I wrote in the first reply buy there doesn’t seem to be that option. Just to be clearer, here are the three questions I have:
1. When they claim one dies of a drug overdose every 19 minutes, and you say “all drugs” do you mean heroin, crack, cocaine, methamphetamines and even alcohol?
It does not include alcohol but it includes NON-CONTROLLED MEDS and OTC meds… as well as all ILLEGAL drugs. If they die of a prescription medication OD.. they don’t distinguish if they ever had it prescribed to them legally.
2. Is there any study that has singled out how many people actually die of prescription opiates because from what I’m reading, these sweeping statements have created a climate whereby certain statistics are being misinterpreted by clinicians, politicians, and the media in the overzealous quest to do something about addictive behavior and people dying. Unfortunately, it appears that legitimate patients are becoming collateral damage because some doctor’s are either running scared from CDC guidelines or they are avoiding wanting to treat patients with opoid medication that has been used successfully for 50 years until recent times.
A certain politician has said he would stop all the drug cartels but a person told me that would be next to impossible to accomplish, is that true? I saw a 2012 film “Savages” by Oliver Stone with john Travolta and Selma Hyatt and wonder if drug cartels are perhaps replacing cannibus (which was the “drug” in the film with a new demand for opiods by putting heroin cut with fentenal and other addictive drugs on the streets of America.
IF we treated all addicts with pharmaceutical grade medications.. the cartels would have little/no customers. We tried to stop alcoholism and that lasted 12-14 yrs.. maybe because all the bureaucrats, that were alcoholics, couldn’t get their booze ?
We have tried to show people why they shouldn’t smoke… but they continue to start up smoking and 450,000 people die every year from use/abuse.
I haven’t seen the first chapter of “MOTHERS AGAINST SMOKERS”.. I have yet to see any large protests in the front of stores that sell Alcohol ?
Tobacco kills more people in ONE YEAR as all the soldiers that died in the FOUR YEARS of WW II.
” IF we treated all addicts with pharmaceutical grade medications.. the cartels would have little/no customers”
That’s really interesting as that’s exactly what someone said is only answer which is to legalize, regulate and control everything which sounds far out (at least in my lifetime; but there is actually a police association that supports this but I forget their name. I’m sure you have heard of them. And I think there is a country in Europe (maybe Portugal or Switzerland) that does something like that and I believe they don’t have problems like we do. Why don’t we learn what works from other countries? We are suppose to be this free country that per the constitution allows us to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness .
Did you know about 25 million people live in food deserts meaning they don’t live within access to fresh food….just convenience stores with all that fake artifical food. I lived in third world country where there is so much poverty but even the poorest seemed to be happy; you don’t see obesity and malnutrition like we have here because they are allowed to have have freedom to move about and there are small stores and carts that sell fresh whole food everywhere…I say this just to illustrate how all these regulations we have just created a stranglehold in other segments of life as well in order to have “security” and what we consider a so-called civilized society.
WOW,,,,AMEN,,,,, author nailed it,,jmo,,,Like i said in a early post,,the politician from W.V,,defines epidemic as lack of control over our medicines,,on cspan,,,sooo,his motive is NOT to be humane towards the medically ill,,,,if all a politicians define or agree w/this W.V,,senator,,,no wonder why soo many of is are dyeing or forced to live their life time literally in physical pain from medical illness,,,maryw
As I mentioned above, I printed out this scientific report from the Journal of Pain & Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy by Willem Scholten & Jack E. Henningfield: Negative Outcomes of unbalanced opioid policy supported by clinicians, politicians and the media and then by chance just happened to have run into Charlie Crist after the Clinton Rally and he was very receptive to what I was trying to explain with my limited knowledge. I’ve been wanting to follow up and/or maybe send him more information plus a summary much like what I’m sharing below that extracts some of the information that I think may even answer my original question but it’s so scientific, I’m not sure so maybe you can analyze it and summarize in a few sentences that would be something we all could share in our letters to the President and congress members to get their attention! NOTE, i HAVE PUT paranthese around direct quotes from the full 10 page report (link below)
EXCERPT FROM FIRST page TITLED: The epidemic of harmful use of opiods. ” The term “prescription opiod” was initially used to distinguish between opiod medications and illicitly trafficked substances such as powdered heroin. However, what constitute prescription opiods (which may include stolen and illicitly trafficked medications) soon became unclear and was considered to be synonymous with prescribed opioids. Consequently, without much analysis of what actually contributes to nonmedical use, measures were taken to limit the availability of such medicine that could be prescribed to patients with pain.” This continues for another two pages in depth.
Next subject highlighted: SYMPTOMS OF ILL-CONSIDERED POLICIES: (ALL THIS IS FOLLOWED BY 3 PAGES OF references btW) These pages are really detailed and I’m going to copy a bit that sums up what is preceded with lot of scientific data. THEY SHOW SEVERAL TWEETS BY President Obama made in October 2015 for example: “4 in 5 heroin users started out by misusing prescription opiods. Heroin related deaths nearly quadrupled between 2002 and 2013”
They go on to say, “The media and politicians often are eager to enter the debate over restriction of opiods without much nuance. Examples are recent tweets by the POTUS in which the information was presented inaccurately. In reality, the 2012 annual consumption of opiods in the US was 7.4 defined daily dosages per capita. …Bottles exist in many sizes but the President’s message was based on a bottle size of only 7 to 10 pills.”…referring to that one tweet, about the heroin related deaths quadrupled……”it is only half of the truth …going on they say “The President was responding to data presented by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Those data were apparently interpreted by the President as implying that harmful use of heroin and overdose are caused in part by prescription opiate use and prescribing. In fact, harmful use of heroin and overdose is a decades long problem in the US as well as many other countries that have very low rates of prescription opiod prescribing. ….illustrating the complexity of the relationships between harmful use and overdose of prescription opiods withe harmful use and overdose of heroin is that when the harmful use of prescrption opiods began to decline, as documented by several key measures near the end of the first decade of 21st century, heroin overdose deaths began to increase. ”
NEXT SUBJECT: DEMONIZING PATIENTS: This is about half a page and I’ll find something to quote that hopefully easy to understand: ” “When Scholten and Henningfield compared the results of patient noncompliance in the general population of patients who use (medicine, noncompliance was not any different between the two groups meaning that patients receiving opiods use their medication as correctly or inaccurately as patients receiving any other medications. .
…Another example is the terminology some researchers use to build their case. Some authors qualify patient noncompliance as “aberrant” By using such pejorative terminology, researchers insinuate that patients are “drug abusers” if they do not follow the prescribers’ instructions exactly. It also denies that individuals can have good reasons for deviating from the instructions for use.”
LAST FEW PAGES TITLED RATIONAL POLICIES REQUIRE ACCURATE ANALYSIS AND ENDS WITH 53 References. I thought this next quote was interesting in that this is not a world wide problem but OUR PROBLEM AND I HAVE MY OWN OPINION AS TO WHY THIS IS AND THIS IS NOT ADDRESSED IN THIS REPORT SO I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR WHAT OTHER’S THINK WHY THIS “PROBLEM” IS HAPPENING HERE (MONEY, BIG PHARMA POWER, DRUG CARTELS, ETC.)
SPECIFICALLY, they report: “In the absence of a good situational analysis, some North American authors and presenters at national and international conferences have tended to impose the problem on countries where it does not exist, encouraging these countries to remedy imaginary complaints…” For example, a few years ago, a friend whose husband is a doctor from Bangladesh told me that Morphine was available over the counter and not a problem in that country. Other countries, just marijuana can put you in jail for years.
SUMMARY EXCERPT FROM LAST TWO PAGES UNDER rational policies require accurate analysis:
“Doctor’s are suppose to act in the interest of their patients. Researchers are suppose – at least- to not act against their subjects’ interests. Politicians act in the interest of being reelected, but should know the limits of what is ethical. However, we see a disturbing tendency of doctors, researchers, politicians, and the media to be preoccupied by the wrong aspects of opiod use, losing sight of the picture as a whole. The result is often that patients are bearing the burden of efforts to minimize nonmedical use. ”
http://www.tandfonline.com/…/…/10.3109/15360288.2015.1136368
The above link is not working anymore
http://www.tandfonline.com/…/…/10.3109/15360288.2015.1136368 should take you to study entitled: NEGATIVE OUTCOMES OF UNBALANCED OPIOID POLICY SUPPORTED BY CLINICIANS, POILITICIANS, AND THE MEDIA which is found in the Journal of Pain and Palliativer Care Pharmacotherapy and the full 10 paged study was published in Feb 18, 2016 This explains how the statistics have been misunderstood so that when the President says 120 dying daily from prescription medications, it’s not true actually the figures are based on deaths from any drug including all street drugs and heroin so it is very misleading yet the people needing medication for pain are the one’s who are being punished, treated like addicts and doctor’s who are fearful of DEA are dropping them and leaving many to go into withdrawal and some are even killing themselves rather than live with the pain.
I heard something last night on the news about a whole bunch of people dying in short time of I think it was some new street drug but I was half asleep missed the story. When they claim one dies of a drug overdose every 19 minutes, and you say “all drugs” do you mean heroin, crack, cocaine, methamphetamines and even alcohol? Please answer that question and the next sentence question.
Is there any study that has singled out how many people actually die of prescription opiates because it is the legitimate patients who are becoming collateral damage because of these sweeping statistics that seem to be misinterpreted by media and politicians. Or do they know the truth and it’s just about other ulterior motives of wanting people on new generation of drugs or about creating jobs from expanding the industry of recovery centers?
I didn’t really know all this was going on until about a month ago but a little research and it’s clear something is going on and anyone can see something is happening , plus it’s on the news and/or I’m more aware of hearing something about opiods and drugs on the news; however, I’m still confused about what is really happening, why the misinterpretations, and real motivations of doctor’s who are dropping patients or expecting them to just “managed” their pain with sunshine and roses like one of those videos I saw last week on FFFP I
In the Journal of Pain and Palliative Care Study (Negative outcomes of unbalanced opioid policy supported by clinicians, politicians, and the media) even POTUS is used as an example of a misleading statement: “120 Americans die everyday from drug overdoses – most involving legal prescription drugs. ” further…they write: “In the US a recent study found that the majority of people in treatment for opioid dependence initiated opioid use with heroin and other illicitly manufactured opioids, not prescription opioids.” It’s a 10 page document with two pages of references. That’s one of the papers I gave to former Fl Governor Charlie Crist who is running for congress.