The Opioid Epidemic Keeps Killing My Friends
Tuesday, February 19, 2019 11:25
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“The Opioid Epidemic Keeps Killing My Friends”
By Karol Markowicz
“I lost a friend last week. She was 42 years old, and it was a drug overdose. She was beautiful, smart, kind. I gave a eulogy at her funeral. Peering at her loved ones and our mutual friends through a wall of tears, I said she had been a burst of color in a gray world. She was a real person, and now she’s gone. It wasn’t the first funeral I’ve attended for someone who had died this way, but she was the closest. It wasn’t even the second or the fifth. She was the second woman to overdose from just my small group of high-school friends.
The opioid crisis has become personal for me. It is, among many other things, a crisis for American women my age. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from a few weeks ago tells the bigger story: “Among women aged 30–64 years, the unadjusted drug-overdose death rate increased” 260 percent since 1999.
When I tell people about the loss, they nod their heads or tell me their own stories. People are dying from drug overdoses at a sky-high rate, and everyone knows someone who has been lost. Opioids aren’t a crisis anymore; they are an epidemic. According to the CDC, “130 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose.” I’ve known too many of those Americans. Maybe you have too. They aren’t mere statistics.
After the funerals, the friends and family stood around looking at the ground. We assured each other that there was nothing anybody could have done for the deceased. It’s true, but it’s cold comfort. We play back the last moments, the last time we spoke, our last interactions. Were there signs? Maybe. Even if we knew, what could anyone do? Addiction is a sneaky disease, and addicts can get very good at hiding the fact that they are afflicted.
The range of the afflicted has expanded. My friend was a college graduate with parents who loved her. These kinds of details shouldn’t matter when we talk about people who die young, but for so long we were able to dismiss this epidemic as something that happens to other people – the ones alone, without family, without love. The last few years have exploded this misconception. The epidemic has been moving ever closer to us My ethnic community is among the hard-hit. There isn’t much research on drug use specifically among immigrants from the former Soviet Union living in New York. But one 2012 paper noted that substance-abuse and HIV rates among immigrants from the former Soviet Union “appear to be disproportionately high” in comparison to other immigrant groups and “possibly even native populations.”
We go to too many funerals these days. The most discomforting thing in our post-funeral conversations is the lack of surprise. Maybe we didn’t know this person specifically was using, but it’s so widespread that it could happen to anyone at anytime.
Those of us on the outside of this crisis grope for a solution, but solutions are scarce. You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved. You can’t help someone who doesn’t necessarily appear to need help. There is no government program that can help a drug addict who doesn’t want to stop using.
There is no magic fix to help prevent people from starting in the first place. The helplessness is the worst part.
There is nothing anybody can do. We clutch our children and beg them never to try it. “It’s poison. You will die. I don’t want to go to your funeral and sit in the front row, shaking and shell-shocked like my friend’s mother. I want you to live.” We want to scare our children, to make them understand the depth of the peril. We know that it’s entirely out of our hands.
My friend was much loved. I loved her. I so badly want to revisit those moments when I might have sensed she was in trouble, but her easy laughter and her soft voice convinced me otherwise. I wish there were something I could have done, some way I could have stepped in. There was nothing anybody could do. I know this. But it doesn’t help me sleep at night thinking about all we’ve lost.”
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“Opioid Crisis Leaves 700,000 Americans Dead:
‘Epidemic Continues To Worsen And Evolve’”
by Tyler Durden
“More than 700,000 Americans died from drug overdoses from 1999 to 2017, about 10% of them in 2017 alone, according to a new report published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In total, there were a staggering 70,237 drug overdose deaths last year, which is more deaths than all US military fatal casualties of the Vietnam War. Opioids were involved in 67.8%, or 47,600 of those deaths. Of those opioid-related overdose deaths, 59.8% of them, or 28,466, were due to synthetic opioids.
The report, which was published online in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), also examined drug overdose deaths from 2013-17. During that time, “drug overdose death rates increased in 35 of 50 states and DC, and significant increases in death rates involving synthetic opioids occurred in 15 of 20 states,” the report said adding that the rapid increase was driven by fentanyl. Of the 35 districts reporting data, 23 states and DC noticed increased rates of death directly linked to synthetic opioids. Fentanyl overdose deaths surged 150% from 2016 to 2017.
From 2013-2017, the largest increase in drug overdose death rates involved synthetic#opioids (other than methadone) – likely fueled by illicitly manufactured #fentanyl. Read more @CDCMMWR
- Dr. Robert R. Redfield (@CDCDirector) December 21, 2018
In prior reports, synthetic opioid-related deaths primarily occurred east of the Mississippi River. The latest CDC data now shows 8 states west of the Mississippi had significant increases in such deaths: Arizona, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, Texas, and Washington.
The CDC said overdoses were seen in both men and women, as well as non-Hispanic blacks, non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics, blacks, had the largest relative change, which was 25.2%. The most significant increase in deaths occurred among 25 to 44-year-old men, a sobering reality that demonstrates America’s prime working age men are deteriorating. “Through 2017, the drug overdose epidemic continues to worsen and evolve, and the involvement of many types of drugs (e.g., opioids, cocaine, and methamphetamine) underscores the urgency to obtain more timely and local data to inform public health and public safety action,” the report said.
In a separate, but relevant report, Altarum, an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based health care research and consulting firm said the opioid epidemic’s economic toll is disastrous. The report said, “the societal benefit of eliminating opioid overdoses, death and use disorders reached $115 billion in 2017, up from $95.3 billion for 2016.” The total exceeds $1 trillion when the costs from 2001 to 2017 are compiled. Another $500 billion is expected to be added to this sum by 2020. Lost earnings and waning productivity account for much of these costs and also result in declining tax dollars collected. Altarum estimated direct health care costs totaled $12.2 billion in 2016. Indirect health care costs totaled an estimated $9.2 billion.
Altarum also lists many “nonmonetized impacts” including decreased quality of life, emotional burdens and “disparate community impacts,” such as decreased property values and loss of perceived community well-being.
Despite President Trump pledging to put an “extremely big dent” in the drug addiction crisis in America, the problem continues to escalation at an exponential pace with little signs of slowing. And making matters worse, the crisis will likely deteriorate during the next recession, expected to materialize some time in late 2019, and just in time for the 2020 election.”
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And so, what do our Rulers do?
Oh yeah, we need this monster loose on the streets, right?
“As Overdose Deaths Soar To Record Highs,
FDA Approves New Painkiller That’s 1,000X More Powerful Than Morphine”
by Tyler Durden
“Purdue Pharma and other pioneers of powerful opioid painkillers probably felt a twinge of regret on Friday when the FDA approved a powerful new opioid painkiller that’s 10 times stronger than fentanyl – the deadly synthetic opioid that’s been blamed for the record number of drug overdose deaths recorded in 2017 – and 1,000 times more powerful than morphine, ignoring the objections of lawmakers and its own advisory committee in the process.
After all that trouble that purveyors of opioids like Purdue and the Sackler family went to in order to win approval – doctoring internal research and suborning doctors to convince the FDA to approve powerful painkillers like OxyContin despite wildly underestimating the drug’s abuse potential – the agency might very well have approved those drugs anyway? And opioid makers might have been able to avoid some of the legal consequences stemming from this dishonesty, like the avalanche of lawsuits brought by state AGs.
What’s perhaps even more galling is that the FDA approved the drug after official data showed 2017 was the deadliest year for overdose deaths in US history, with more than 70,000 recorded drug-related fatalities, many of which were caused by powerful synthetic opioids like the main ingredient in Dsuvia, the brand name under which the new painkiller will be sold.
Dsuvia is a 3-millimeter tablet of sufentanil made by AcelRx. It’s a sublingual tablet intended to provide effective pain relief in patients for whom most oral painkillers aren’t effective. The FDA’s advisory committee voted 10-3 to recommend approval of the drug, a decision that was accepted by the FDA on Friday. The agency justified its decision by insisting that Dsuvia would be subject to “very tight” restrictions.
“There are very tight restrictions being placed on the distribution and use of this product,” said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb in a written statement Friday regarding his agency’s approval of Dsuvia. “We’ve learned much from the harmful impact that other oral opioid products can have in the context of the opioid crisis. We’ve applied those hard lessons as part of the steps we’re taking to address safety concerns for Dsuvia.”
Still, some of the agency’s actions looked to critics like attempts to stifle internal criticism. For example, the agency scheduled the advisory committee vote on a day where the chairman of the committee, who was opposed to approval, could not attend – while circumventing its normal vetting process, despite the fact that the member in question had notified the agency of his unavailability months beforehand.
But the FDA rejected any and all criticisms related to Dsuvia being sold as a street drug by insisting that the risk of diversion (when doctor-prescribed drugs are illicitly sold on the black market) was low because the drug would only be prescribed in hospital settings, and wouldn’t be doled out at pharmacies. But critics said that, given its potency, Dsuvia would “for sure” be diverted at some level. They also rejected the FDA’s argument that Dsuvia satisfied an important need for pain treatment: offering rapid, effective relief for obese patients or others lacking easily accessible veins.
While a niche may eventually be found for Dsuvia, “it’s not like we need it…and it’s for sure, at some level, going to be diverted,” said Dr. Palmer MacKie, assistant professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine and director of the Eskenazi Health Integrative Pain Program in Indianapolis. “Do we really want an opportunity to divert another medicine?”
Fortunately for Dsuvia’s manufacturer, AcelRx, these public health risks pale in comparison to the enormous profits that the company stands to reap from sales. The company anticipates $1.1 billion in annual sales, and hopes to have its product in hospitals early next year.
It goes without saying that cancer patients and others suffering from life threatening illnesses have a legitimate need for effective pain relief. But when the FDA says Dsuvia is needed in the hospital setting, it probably isn’t telling the whole story. Because, as the Washington Post pointed out, the medication’s development was financed in part by the Department of Defense, which believes Dsuvia will be an effective treatment for emergency pain relief on the battlefield – like when a soldier gets his legs blown off after accidentally stepping on an IUD. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice’s war on medical marijuana continues despite President Trump’s token resistance.”
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Let that sink in…
Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-opioid-epidemic-keeps-killing-my.html
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