Pubdate: Thu, 09 Jun 2016
Source: Sacramento News & Review (CA)
Copyright: 2016 Chico Community Publishing, Inc.
Contact:  http://newsreview.com/sacto/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/540
Author: Jeff vonKaenel

OPIATE ADDICTION

Can we put the genie back in the bottle?

The news was grim.

"I received a call that people were pouring into the emergency room 
dead on arrival after taking counterfeit Norco laced with fentanyl," 
Sacramento County Public Health Officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye told 
health professionals gathered at the Prescription Drug Awareness 
Conference held at Sacramento State University on May 20.

Trying desperately to prevent additional deaths, Kasirye says she 
went into overdrive to get the word out about this dangerous batch of 
fake Norco. Norco is a prescription painkiller, but this batch 
contained fentanyl, a powerful painkiller hundreds of times stronger 
than heroin.

Luckily, she was able to. Otherwise, this could have been much worse. 
Fifty-two patients were admitted for fentanyl overdoses, and 
eventually 12 people would die. But this will probably make up less 
than 10 percent of the Sacramento County residents who will die this 
year from drug poisoning.

Americans are misusing opiates at a frightening rate. According to 
the Center for Disease Control, in 2014, there were more than 47,000 
drug-related deaths, 40 percent more deaths than from car accidents. 
An estimated 2 million Americans abuse or are dependent on 
prescription opioids.

It is this crisis that brought together Rep. Ami Bera, 
representatives of the Department of Justice, Pain Management 
Specialist and California Medical Association board member Dr. Lee 
Snook, and other local healthcare leaders, to discuss how 
prescription drug abuse affects the healthcare industry.

How did we get into this mess? The speakers agreed on the facts. For 
many years, patients were undertreated for pain, due to fears of 
addiction to pain medications. In the mid-1980s, there was talk about 
reducing unnecessary pain for patients. This led to new regulations 
encouraging pain relief. But, the most effective pain medications are 
opiates, which are very addicting, and doctors were still reluctant 
to prescribe them.

In 1996, Purdue Pharma came out with a new drug called OxyContin, 
which they heavily marketed as being less addictive than other 
painkillers on the market, in one of the most aggressive marketing 
campaigns for any narcotic ever. As a result, the company made 
billions of dollars in sales. But as sales of OxyContin skyrocketed, 
overdose deaths rose at about the same rate, and new studies came out 
that showed that OxyContin was, in fact, highly addictive. In 2007, 
Purdue Pharma had to pay $600 million in fines for misleading doctors 
and patients.

But the addiction problem continued to grow. According to the CDC, in 
2013, a quarter-billion prescriptions were written for opioids. This 
is more than enough to give every American adult his or her own 
bottle of pills.

When I asked the Department of Justice speaker why her department 
lets the company that created the opiate problem continue to make 
money selling this abused drug, she had no answer. People can go to 
jail for passing a few bad checks, but the banks who earned billions 
of dollars from fraud got a bailout. Drug dealers on the corner go to 
prison, but the pharmaceutical industry makes billions of dollars 
from these highly addictive drugs, with minimal consequences.

So what has been the response of the pharmaceutical industry to this 
opiate epidemic? Will it donate a percentage of its profits to help 
those whose lives it has destroyed? Probably not.

Instead, Big Pharma wants to eliminate low-cost generic drugs and to 
replace them with similar, much more expensive, patented drugs. What 
a surprise.

Instead, Big Pharma has used its political muscle to prevent the 
federal government from negotiating drug prices for Medicare-the 
largest government purchaser of health care.

At this workshop, I heard about a plan to have pharmacies that 
disperse prescriptions be required to take back leftover drugs so 
that they will not be used or disposed of. This is being done in 
Canada and could be paid for by a small fee levied on drug companies. 
A few pennies per prescription, and it might make a small dent in this problem.

But Big Pharma opposes this plan. Again, not a surprise.

The U.S. is the only country in the world facing this ballooning 
prescription drug problem. Our capitalist system treats health care 
as just another profit opportunity, one reason that we pay more than 
50 percent higher costs than other industrial countries for inferior 
health outcomes. Unless this changes, or the government steps in to 
put controls on these pharmaceutical companies, it's going to be very 
difficult to contain this epidemic.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom