Funerals For Friends: How Public Health In Colorado Handles Growing Prescription Drug Misuse

A health leader from Colorado’s stunningly beautiful but economically challenged San Luis Valley sobered an afternoon crowd by declaring that his rural community was “flirting with an epidemic” of opioid overdoses and deaths. Hours later, statewide experts called that assessment of substance use in the West too optimistic. “It’s more like a shotgun wedding with an epidemic,” pronounced Robert Valuck, an epidemiologist, professor at the University of Colorado Denver Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and coordinator of the Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention. The opioid painkiller epidemic, leading directly to use of cheaper and even more dangerous heroin, is all too real in every state of the union, Valuck warned his evening audience on the opening night of the Colorado Health Symposium 2016. Valuck elicited audible gasps from the crowd when he offered a math lesson in modern opioid prescribing—enough scripts are now written in the United States each year to give every adult a Vicodin every four hours for an entire month. In Colorado’s rural southern counties, where overdose death rates are climbing at an alarming rate, the destruction is all the more visible, said Freddie Jacquez, executive director of the San Luis Valley Area Health Education Center. “We know these people,” Jacquez said. “We’re going to a lot of funerals.” Intense and often emotional discussions of substance use were purposely programmed i...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Drugs and Medical Technology Featured GrantWatch Public Health addiction Colorado Health Symposium Consumers Emergency departments Health Philanthropy Health Promotion and Disease PreventionGW Hospitals marijuana opioid epidemic Source Type: blogs