It's a myth that heroin and opiate addiction are the result of pain killer prescriptions: "According to the large, annually repeated and representative National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 75 percent of all opioid misuse starts with people using medication that wasn’t prescribed for them—obtained from a friend, family member or dealer. "
The initial availability of the drugs was from a prescription. If it weren't for the ready availability of the drugs, far fewer people would be addicted.
People are addicted to pain killers usually because they are dealing with pain, and they are either medicating or self-medicating to manage it.
If mere availability of something addictive was the problem, then we'd have a nation of nothing but alcoholics and cigarette smokers considering you can buy either in an unlimited quantity at any corner store.
> A Cochrane review of opioid prescribing for chronic pain found that less than one percent of those who were well-screened for drug problems developed new addictions during pain care; a less rigorous, but more recent review put the rate of addiction among people taking opioids for chronic pain at 8-12 percent.
Let's have a look at what that Cochrane review says:
> The findings of this systematic review suggest that proper management of a type of strong painkiller (opioids) in well-selected patients with no history of substance addiction or abuse can lead to long-term pain relief for some patients with a very small (though not zero) risk of developing addiction, abuse, or other serious side effects. However, the evidence supporting these conclusions is weak, and longer-term studies are needed to identify the patients who are most likely to benefit from treatment.
This tells us that the carefully selected patients were not getting pain relief or had too many side effects; (a third dropped out because of these) and we can't say too much about addiction because not all the studies reported it: "Signs of opioid addiction were reported in 0.27% of participants in the studies that reported that outcome"
It's hard to see that 0.27% (with who knows how many unreported cases of addiction) and that later 8-12% in the same paragraph.
> Moreover, a study of nearly 136,000 opioid overdose victims treated in the emergency room in 2010, which was published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2014 found that just 13 percent had a chronic pain condition.
I mean, doesn't that tell you there's a massive problem with prescribing?
> recent research on roughly one million insurance claims for opioid prescriptions showed that just less than five percent of patients misused the drugs by getting prescriptions for them from multiple doctors.
> The use and abuse of prescription opioids continues to be a challenging and costly crisis for the U.S. The facts underscore the severity of this crisis:
> • Nearly 2 million Americans are abusing prescription opioids1
> • 16,000 people die every year from prescription opioid
overdoses2
> • Sales of opioid prescriptions in the U.S. nearly quadrupled from 1999 to 20103
> • 259 million opioid prescriptions were written in 2012, enough for every American adult to have their own bottle of pills4
That Scientific American writer has misrepresented every source so far.
For fuck's sake, that last link specifically says:
> One out of every three (32%) opioid prescriptions is being abused.
