I mentioned the other day that opioid use is now the biggest threat to teenagers and young adults. Consider the following facts about buprenorphine (suboxone), a relatively new treatment for opioid-addicted people.
Suboxone is the blockbuster drug most people have never heard of. Surpassing well-known medications like Viagra and Adderall, it generated $1.55 billion in United States sales last year, its success fueled by an exploding opioid abuse epidemic and the embrace of federal officials who helped finance its development and promoted it as a safer, less stigmatized alternative to methadone.
It has also become a lucrative commodity, creating moneymaking opportunities — for manufacturers, doctors, drug dealers and even patients — that have undermined a public health innovation meant for social good. And the drug’s problems have emboldened some insurers to limit coverage of the medication, which cost state Medicaid agencies at least $857 million over a three-year period through 2012, a New York Times survey found.
There are some serious problems with suboxone, but at least the drug was created in an effort to help opioid-dependent people from continuing to use heroin and other powerful prescription drugs that can kill them or lead them to a life of dissolution and crime.
Consider that it is costing Medicaid programs almost $300 million a year just for this one strategy of treating opioid addiction. Consider the magnitude of the problem if suboxone is generating over $1.5 billion in sales annually. That the drug is outselling Viagra is a pretty strong indicator of how how widespread the opioid problem has become.
Yet, how often do you hear anyone talk openly about this?
This may be changing, however. The Pennsylvania legislature held a hearing about the issue last week. Some things they learned:
They don’t have to sell Delaware County District Attorney Jack Whelan. He saw the alarming numbers and quickly put together the task force to combat this new scourge.
Whelan explains one of the “hidden” facets of this new public health menace. Many times people are introduced to the problem through legal prescriptions for opioids and other powerful painkillers. Soon they’re addicted. Then these addicts start looking for a cheaper high. That often leads them to heroin. Or to crime to feed their habit. Or to their parents’ medicine cabinet to steal prescription drugs.
How serious is the problem. Delaware County Executive Director Marianne Grace offered some sobering numbers for the House panel.
Grace noted that in 2007 Delaware County had 16 heroin fatalities. That number mushroomed to 61 in 2011. In total, there were 232 heroin-related deaths from 2007 to 2013.
And the problem seems to be getting worse.
County Medical Examiner Dr. Fredric Hellman told the panel that just this year, the county has been rocked by 130 drug-related deaths. Of those, he concluded that half were heroin-related. He correctly referred to it as “the scourge that we have been chasing.”
The anonymous nature of 12-Step programs has long-interfered with people in recovery’s ability and willingness to speak out as advocates for better and more sensible public policy on addiction, but the stigma attached to heroin is so strong that parents groups have been slow to emerge. My sense is that the problem has grown so quickly and ferociously that it is overwhelming whole communities, and we’re about to see more openness about the issue.
I’m glad that the Pennsylvania legislature is taking a look at the problem, but I don’t know if they will figure out that sustained rehabilitative services are a much better investment than throwing a whole generation of kids in prison. They didn’t figure that out for crack, but maybe recovery activists will have more success this time since this is a suburban scourge as well as an urban one. I hate to say it, but white kids have a prayer that brown ones never had. The government might have mercy upon them.
One of the big advantages that will come with marijuana legalization is that this particular addiction pathway will happen a lot less. A lot of those addictions occur due to chronic pain management, which can also be done with marijuana rather than opiates – except marijuana is far less addictive and basically never lethal.
Ironically after all the decades of panic about marijuana as a gateway drug we can see that legal opiate pharmaceuticals are the real gateway drug to heroin, and marijuana is actually kind of an anti-gateway drug.
Of course, when you say basically never lethal, what you mean is, it is never lethal, and never will be.
I’m glad that the Pennsylvania legislature is taking a look at the problem, …
Did they ever reform the court system after the corruption scandal in northern PA? And given the legislature is controlled by Teahadist assholes, I don’t expect any good solution for at least another 14 months, if that.
I have no hope. The right has reduced jail to a profit driven corporate business. They seem to be determined to under fund and under staff the courts…..and lets not forget America is broke, thus unable to spend money on the other.
You say Hope, I say guillotine.
Let’s get the whole thing started.
America isn’t broke.
There were two inevitable consequences of the Afghanistan war–increased debt and lower prices for opiates. We should no more be surprised by this than by the increase in cocaine addiction in connection at the time of Iran-Contra. When the CIA self-consciously engages with nasty operators sometimes the price is CIA hauling of contraband. Indeed, one wonders what part of the contraband market is operated through the CIA.
In addition social research has shown consistently and for decades that increases in unemployment and decreases in income are associated in the aggregate with increases in drug addiction–including alcoholism. And drug-related deaths.
Legislators who want to do something about drug addiction problems should first look at those two large issues.
The secrecy of 12-step programs is not a cause of the stigma on people with drug addictions, it’s a response because of the active discrimination against people with drug addictions. And that discrimination is very hard to root out–even when there are clear cases of addiction among the very rich who are tolerated in their positions of high responsibility (cough, Toronto).
It is not very hard to see how race and class plays into this. And it’s also not very hard to see why something that for a lot of conservatives is seen as a moral failing never gets properly addressed with the resources that could deal with it.
If there were honest reporters on this issue, one would see a better distinction made between drug use, recreational drug use, and drug abuse. And between the particular drugs in question.
And there would be more attention paid to addictive behaviors and their sources in general. For example, George Walker Bush is a Jesus-religion addiction in the midst of overdosing. Anne Wilson Schaef wrote a book several decades ago called When Society Becomes an Addict. It’s probably a good time to re-read it as our politics seems stuck in compulsive repetitive behavior.
Yup. No surprise here.
When people feel that there’s little or no hope, they turn to legal and illegal drugs, and alcohol, to ease their suffering. And that other opiate of the masses – religion.
If we can give people some hope for the future, maybe they’ll stop looking for alternatives to that hope.
But, we can’t, because… FreeDUMB! LiberTEA!!!
better quality of life overall [health care will make a big difference as well as job prospects] and serious $$ for addiction treatment will/ would make a great difference.
Most of the kids who are dying were already hooked on opioids before they touched heroin.
They start out taking Percosets and Oxy-Contin at parties, graduate to taking Dilaudid at home, and then discover that it’s much cheaper to just do heroin.
They also tend to go from popping pills to snorting them to shooting them.
Pretty much as soon as you are hooked on opioids in any form, it’s a locomotive leading to intravenous heroin use, crime, jail, overdose, rehab, and death.
The problem is so widespread right now that more than one death a day is occurring in every suburban Philly county. In the article above, you can do the math and at least 65 people in Delaware County have already died this year from heroin overdoses, with more from prescription opioids.
Look at this:
Bensalem is in Bucks County, just north of the city line. It has a population below 60,000. In other words, more than 1/1000th of its citizens overdosed in September.
typo above: more than one person a week (not a day) is dying in every suburban county.
What’s the culture of Bensalem that creates this level of drug partying?
why assume it’s drug partying. could be driven by despair and isolation, parental pressure, . many issues for young ppl today
This:
starting out
sorry, posted before wrote the comment
I’m not reading it as anything outside the usual high school parties that kids have always had; it’s kind of what I mean about young ppl having a difficult time these days and worries for concerned parents.
I don’t know of anything specific to Bensalem. It’s kind of a strip-mall landscape from hell that borders North Philly, where the heroin trade is in its full glory.
They had an especially rough month of September, but it’s going on in Delaware, Montgomery, Berks, Chester, Lancaster, everywhere. It’s taking down whole gaggles of kids at a time.
And it’s countrywide. It’s only worse here because Wilmington and Philly are two ports of entry for the shit.
Transcends race, class, etc.?
Most drugs have demographic profiles to an extent.
Are these downwardly mobile middle class suburbs of Philly and Wilmington? Does it extent to rural areas? Into Philly itself?
I’ve seen little coverage of this in this area, but that might be a function of the journalists and the statistics.
I’ve been working with college aged kids for quite a while. I can’t begin to describe what overwhelming issues they are up against, It would break your heart. and the kids are aware and able to talk about it. there are many aspects on the drug side – the fact that, for example, girls must always be wary of possible rape, date rape drugs, etc. Or, for example, the over-perscription of ADD drugs for this generation (many of whom now show side effects in college) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/health/more-diagnoses-of-hyperactivity-causing-concern.html?pagewa
nted%253Dall&_r=0
It’s everywhere. It’s a top killer of women in their 30’s and 40’s. It’s in all the suburban schools, it’s in the city. The associated crime is rampant.
Here’s another recent local treatment.
this is horrifying
Surely, you mean “Viva Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II,” don’t you, troll?
Why are you calling Errol a troll?
Sorry if I made a mistake.
When I read “Viva Obama,” my impression was that he was blaming President Obama for over 40 years of the consequences of ‘Conservatives Gone Wild!’
????
Viva Obama comes from this song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKzkRA5Wxds
My bad.
Sorry.
well I hope you like the song {y hasta con plan de salud !!! my favorite line]
here’s a better resolution video of the original
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GvBCm7fQn8
y Norteño version has subtitles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlti12dTVQI
It’s a signature.
I would like to point out that some people take drugs just because they make you feel really really fucking good.