From Baptist Health South Florida
Education
5 min. read
Written By: Staff News Team
Published: March 7, 2016
Written By: Staff News Team
Published: March 7, 2016
(David Vittoria is assistant vice president of the South Miami Hospital Addiction Treatment & Recovery Center.)
Eric, a teenager, started taking Oxycontin from his uncle’s medicine cabinet and using it at parties with his friends.
Harold, a 45-year-old father and construction worker, suffers from chronic back pain and was prescribed Percocet by a primary care physician lacking training in pain management.
Both are now heroin addicts. How did this happen?
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, nearly half of young people who inject heroin, and were surveyed in three recent studies, reported abusing prescription opioids before starting to use heroin. Meanwhile, heroin has become more readily available to adult users of all ages. The drug has also become more potent and cheaper than ever (more supply than demand).
The convergence of all these factors has created a drug epidemic. More people are dying of drug overdoses than from car accidents or guns. The topic is frequently featured in the news, with recent stories in the New York Times (“Drug Deaths Reach White America”) and 60 Minutes (“Heroin In The Heartland”) and many other media outlets.
Rural communities are in an especially difficult situation with limited access to education, prevention, medical services, and treatment. Larger cities have built solutions into their emergency medical healthcare systems, but also require additional assistance to help curb the problem.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), unintentional overdoses on Opioid prescription medications, such as Oxycontin and Percocet, quadrupled between 1999 and 2014. There are a number of reasons for this:
When users develop a tolerance to Opioid medications and run out of pills, they often go “doctor shopping” to obtain more. This option is increasingly harder to come by. In the 1990s, these individuals would go to pill mills, or store front locations where they could pay a doctor $100 for a prescription. Some people went to these pill mills for themselves, others visited pill mills to sell to others, often to bring across state lines for sale. Ultimately, legislation was passed to shut down pill mills and take away licenses from doctors operating them, thanks to the efforts of many local, regional and statewide organizations.
With no pill mills, what’s next? Now you have hundreds of thousands of people who are sick; they are hooked on opioid prescriptions and experiencing excruciating side effects associated with withdrawal.
Ten years ago, the cost of a one-day supply of heroin would be about $80; today it is $10. So now our friends Eric, Harold and hundreds of thousands of Opioid addicts are sick, don’t have any place to go and many naturally turn to Heroin.
Heroin and Opioid medications have a strikingly similar effect on our bodies. They have the same chemical compound, bind to the same brain receptor sites and have the same impact on our neurobiology. So, opioid abuse is the same as heroin abuse on the brain and the body.
This issue isn’t going away. So what can we do about it?
We need a multifaceted approach focusing on the following:
In order to keep our children safe, healthy and drug free, all of us need to work together to support these efforts. Whether that means making your children aware of the dangers of prescription drug abuse, securing your medicine, supporting local legislation to help curb the problem, volunteering with local organizations to increase awareness (such as the Ambassador program), or just talking to the people in your life about this issue, we all need to be a part of the solution.
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5 min. read