Government Regulation, Lawyers and the Opioid Crisis

By DEVON HERRICK A short letter to a medical journal nearly 40 years ago may have been the nudge that set the opioid crisis in motion. A letter to the New England Journal of Medicine asserted addiction to prescription opioids was rare, claiming only four addictions were documented out of thousands patients who were prescribed powerful opioid pain pills in a hospital setting. The article has been cited hundreds of times in the years since. Doctors and drug makers may have relied on the letter as evidence that it was safe to prescribed opioids to more patients with chronic pain in settings far removed from carefully supervised hospitals. Nearly 40 years later it has become clear that opioids can be dangerous in the wrong hands. There is also significant risk of diversion to the illicit market. After states began closing down so-called “pill mills,” prescription opioids became less available. To fill the void, heroin and fentanyl began flooding the U.S. to take the place of the once plentiful prescription opioids. Whole regions of the country have been hard hit by prescription drug abuse. Worse yet: other diseases tend to accompany IV drug abuse, including hepatitis C and HIV. I’m reminded of a sequence of events that occurred about a dozen years ago. In late 2004 there was another pain reliever crisis. Pain relievers from a class of selective cyclooxygenase-2 inhibitors known as COX-2 Inhibitors, were suspected of harming patients by boosting the risk of premature death....
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Opiood Crisis Vio Source Type: blogs