Opioid Addiction Epidemic Apologia

10-Acre-Ranch-treatment-photo-of-bottle-of-oxycodone

We have written about opioid use in the past, and for good reason. We are in the grips of a serious epidemic linked to reckless overprescribing of opioid painkillers, like OxyContin (oxycodone) and Vicodin (hydrocodone). Just two painkillers of several that have had a hand in cutting short the lives of Americans from every demographic.

Our reliance on opioid painkillers is a complex story, and like most interesting stories worth reading about, this one is filled with some unsavory characters, both individuals and entire companies, as well as deceit. With well over 2 million prescription opioid addicts and upwards of a half-a-million heroin users, there is definitely cause for concern and a demand for accountability in this narrative. But first, let’s go back to where America’s reliance on opioids began.

The Roots of Our Addiction Epidemic

If you are like most Americans, including many who work in the field of addiction medicine, then you are probably wondering how this epidemic began. You are likely aware that drugs like morphine and heroin have been around for a long time. What’s more, you know that people have been abusing drugs in the opioid family for a very long time, but you may be saying to yourself that what we are seeing today is a far cry from abuse seen in the past.

American doctors were directly responsible for prescribing opioid painkillers for all things pain. But that was not always the case. Two scores ago, American doctors were hesitant to prescribe opioids to patients, except in cases of trauma, surgery or cancer. Then one day, seemingly, caution was thrown out the window by most doctors. Leading to Americans consuming the clear majority of all prescription opioids on the planet. When tracing the path to where the change originated, look no further than the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Often considered the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal.

In 1980, when the nation was in the grips of a cocaine epidemic, few people were thinking about opioid use disorder. So, when Dr. Hershel Jick, a drug specialist at Boston University Medical Center—at that time a graduate student—sent a letter to the NEJM about prescription opioids most people did not think much of it. The Journal chose to publish the letter, a paragraph worth of words that would result (over time) in a staggering death toll and troubling opioid addiction rates. The drug specialist said this week:

“I’m essentially mortified that that letter to the editor was used as an excuse to do what these drug companies did,” Jick told The Associated Press. “They used this letter to spread the word that these drugs were not very addictive.”

Publishing Deadly Words Leads to Clarification

Dr. Jick wrote that out of almost 40,000 patients given prescription opioids at a hospital in Boston, only four cases of addiction were documented, CBS News reports. The letter said that it was rare for people who had no history of addiction to become dependent on opioids. Doctors, for whatever reason, took those words as absolute fact. And pharmaceutical companies with bottom lines in mind, helped disseminate the letter. Now, four decades later, here we find ourselves.

A team of researchers in Canada conducted an analysis, and found that the letter has been cited more than 600 times, according to the article. In many cases, people citing the letter failed to mention that the patients referred to in the letter were hospital patients, not outpatient or people being treated for chronic pain taking prescriptions home.

“It’s difficult to overstate the role of this letter,” said Dr. David Juurlink of the University of Toronto, who led the study. “It was the key bit of literature that helped the opiate manufacturers convince front-line doctors that addiction is not a concern.”

Finally, 40 years later, and realizing the damage that publishing Jick’s letter had on the American public and generations to come, the NEJM published an editor’s note this week, the article reports. The note states:

“For reasons of public health, readers should be aware that this letter has been ‘heavily and uncritically cited’ as evidence that addiction is rare with opioid therapy,” writes Dr. Jeffrey Drazen, the Journal’s top-editor. “People have used the letter to suggest that you’re not going to get addicted to opioids if you get them in a hospital setting. We know that not to be true.”

Treating Opioid Addiction

If you are abusing prescription opioids and/or heroin, please contact 10 Acre Ranch, today. Time is of the essence, we do not need to tell the risks of prolonging treatment any longer. Roughly a hundred people die of an overdose every day.

Methamphetamine Related Overdose Deaths

Methamphetamine also known as crystal meth

Opioid overdose deaths are common. The family of drugs associated with the ever-rising death rates, causes severe respiratory depression. Simply put, a dose that is a little bit too much can cause individuals to stop breathing. Without intervention by way of the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone, there is a high likelihood of death.

The health care system in America has been put, arguably, to its greatest test in modern times. Hospitals emergency departments have been increasingly bogged down in the last two decades due to opioid use disorder and all that can come with it. Anything from potentially deadly infections, blood-transmitted disease and overdoses. One could say that all other health problems related to other types of drugs had become an afterthought. After all, you don’t hear much in the news these days about stimulants.

However, make no mistake about it, cocaine and methamphetamine while not typically associated with overdose, have not gone anywhere. Kilogram after kilogram of stimulant narcotics makes its way into the United States via the southern border. Trafficked by Mexican drug cartels whose ability to operate with relative impunity is very real. In Mexico can be found huge super laboratories manufacturing methamphetamine on a scale never seen before. The days of Americans buying all the Sudafed available in local pharmacies to make the drug in clandestine labs are seemingly behind us, due to government crackdowns. But in Mexico, the meth manufacturing business is booming.

Methamphetamine Is Still a Threat

A number of states have seen a resurgence in meth use, and federal officials fear that the problem is only going to get worse, KTOO Public Media reports. More and more people are using the drug, and many of them are dying from it. Not just the slow death of addiction, people are overdosing on the stimulant in Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma to Montana, Wisconsin and Minnesota and beyond.

“The beginning of the opioid epidemic was 2000 and we thought it was just localized,” said Kimberly Johnson, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). “Now we know that drug outbreaks aren’t likely to stay localized so we can start addressing them sooner and letting other states know of the potential for it spreading.”

Meth Overdose

When most people think of the ugly side effects of meth use, they typically envision weathered looking individuals with bad skin and rotting teeth. This the result of the caustic chemical used to make the drug in inexpensive ways. Beneath the surface, methamphetamine addicts suffer from heart and kidney failure, according to the article. To be sure, the chance of an overdose from opioids is much greater than meth. Yet, people do, in fact, fatally overdose on methamphetamine.

Here are some numbers to consider. Around 3,700 Americans died of a meth-related overdose in 2014, more than double the number of deaths in 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). If 3,700 deaths were not alarming enough, nearly 4,900 meth users died of an overdose in 2015, an increase of 30 percent.

Treating Stimulant Addiction

Are you struggling with meth addiction, please contact 10 Acre Ranch. We have helped a significant number of people break the cycle of meth addiction and go on to live a rewarding life in recovery.

Fentanyl and Carfentanil Taking Lives

Book with fentanyl and test tubes

It would seem that we all live in an era where the drugs of our parents’ generation do not hold the same appeal. That is not to say that people no longer use cocaine, marijuana, speed and heroin (especially heroin); but rather, that the environment has changed dramatically and we live in a time when synthetic drugs are seemingly the biggest threat—at least with respect to posterity. Over the last decade, give or take, the media has flooded America with horror story after horror story, centered on synthetic analogs that are literally killing people.

First, it is important to make clear that the greatest problem regarding drug use today is centered around the American opioid addiction epidemic. A crisis of epic proportions that arose from what can only be called reckless overprescribing of prescription opioid painkillers. For nearly two decades both individual states and the Federal government have been reeling to find a way to reign in the scourge of opioid addiction that resulted from prescribing opioids for all things considered painful, whether that be a stubbed toe or back pain.

What started with pills prescribed legally, morphed into an even greater problem when crackdowns made it harder for already addicted Americans to acquire painkillers from a doctor. Such people did what any addict would do, looked to the black market for relief. A marketplace with zero-oversight and few concerns about patient wellbeing. Many pill abusers found that they could save money and actually achieve a greater high by making the switch to heroin. Thinking that prescription painkillers and heroin were both opioids, what’s the difference? The answer to which is, a lot!

Opioid Mystery Bags

Is it true that people die every day from prescription opioid overdoses? Yes. However, many of the overdose deaths today are the result of using heroin, and it isn’t just the heroin that is killing people. But rather what is mixed into the heroin, unbeknownst to users, in order to boost potency. For a number of years now, people have been dying of overdoses on heroin that is mixed with an extremely powerful synthetic opioid narcotic. One that is often resistant to the life-saving effects of the overdose reversal drug naloxone—sold under the brand name Narcan.

You may already have guessed that the synthetic being referred to is fentanyl. A drug commonly used in hospital settings for surgery and traumatic injuries which is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. The ingredients to make fentanyl can be acquired with relative ease from Chinese laboratories, and shipped overseas to cartels in Mexico. From there, the drug which causes severe respiratory depression is either stamped into pills disguised as other drugs (i.e. OxyContin) or it is mixed in with batches of heroin. Either way, by the time the fentanyl reaches people with opioid use disorder in the U.S., there is little way of knowing what is being consumed.

To make matters even worse, there are stronger analgesics also finding their way into the hands of American drug addicts, once again without their knowledge of the drugs’ presence. Interestingly, the more powerful drugs are analogs of fentanyl, but were never intended for human use.

Gray Death: A Fentanyl Admixture

In Alabama, Georgia and Ohio there has been a spate of deaths linked to dangerous opioid admixture, fittingly referred to as “Gray Death.” It was given the moniker because it looks like concrete mix, and causes overdose, the Associated Press reports. It is usually a mixture of heroin, fentanyl and carfentanil — an analog of fentanyl 10,000 times more potent than morphine, often used to tranquilize large animals like elephants. Sometimes another obscure synthetic opioid called U-47700, which has been associated with dozens of deaths, is added to the bags.

“Gray death is one of the scariest combinations that I have ever seen in nearly 20 years of forensic chemistry drug analysis,” Deneen Kilcrease, manager of the chemistry section at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

If you are actively abusing opioids, these combinations of drugs should be cause for concern. Around one hundred people die every day in this country just from abusing heroin on its own and prescription opioids. If you add something that includes elephant tranquilizers into the mix, then the stakes suddenly get much higher. If you think that you are buying heroin, there is no way of knowing until it’s too late. If you think that just because a pill has an OC stamped on the side and it is therefore OxyContin, it could in fact be something entirely different.

At 10 Acre Ranch, we strongly encourage you to consider reaching out for help. Entering substance use disorder treatment will end the risk of a fatal overdose and prevent the often slow death of active addiction. We can help you break the cycle and show you how to live a fulfilling life in recovery. Please contact us today.