The current epidemic of drug overdoses began in the 1990s, driven by increasing deaths from prescription opioids that paralleled a dramatic increase in the prescribing of such drugs for chronic pain.
The sharp rise in recent years of opoid-induced deaths is in fact due to the consumption of drugs that are rarely used for medical pain management: As of 2015 the rate of overdose deaths due to illegally obtained heroin and synthetic opioids had gone up so much that they took more lives than did all of the other prescribed opioids combined.
7 Over the past two decades, U.S. states have enacted a number of prescription-control laws, most targeting opioid drugs.
Physicians should not prescribe opioids for a longer duration than effective pain management requires, and should consult a prescription drug monitoring database to track patients' use of controlled substances and prevent "Doctor shopping" to obtain multiple prescriptions for the same medical condition.
In 1971 President Richard Nixon inaugurated a nationwide "War on Drugs" to curtail the domestic trade in addictive substances and also launched a massive interdiction campaign to halt import of marijuana from abroad. These efforts were unsuccessful as were subsequent attempts on the part of the federal government and border states to curtail drug trafficking.
In 2017 the U.S. Opioid and Drug Abuse Commission acknowledged that in many situations, opioid substitute treatment achieves better outcomes than coerced abstinence.
24 The Commission report recommended better training of drug counselors, therapists, and prescribers; use by police and emergency care workers of naloxone that can be injected to reverse overdose and save lives; and more funding for "Drug courts" that send addicts to treatment as an alternative to jail.
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/how-to-effectively-combat-the-opioid-epidemic/
The sharp rise in recent years of opoid-induced deaths is in fact due to the consumption of drugs that are rarely used for medical pain management: As of 2015 the rate of overdose deaths due to illegally obtained heroin and synthetic opioids had gone up so much that they took more lives than did all of the other prescribed opioids combined.
7 Over the past two decades, U.S. states have enacted a number of prescription-control laws, most targeting opioid drugs.
Physicians should not prescribe opioids for a longer duration than effective pain management requires, and should consult a prescription drug monitoring database to track patients' use of controlled substances and prevent "Doctor shopping" to obtain multiple prescriptions for the same medical condition.
In 1971 President Richard Nixon inaugurated a nationwide "War on Drugs" to curtail the domestic trade in addictive substances and also launched a massive interdiction campaign to halt import of marijuana from abroad. These efforts were unsuccessful as were subsequent attempts on the part of the federal government and border states to curtail drug trafficking.
In 2017 the U.S. Opioid and Drug Abuse Commission acknowledged that in many situations, opioid substitute treatment achieves better outcomes than coerced abstinence.
24 The Commission report recommended better training of drug counselors, therapists, and prescribers; use by police and emergency care workers of naloxone that can be injected to reverse overdose and save lives; and more funding for "Drug courts" that send addicts to treatment as an alternative to jail.
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/how-to-effectively-combat-the-opioid-epidemic/
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