The Los Angeles Times reports that our nation’s physicians’ irresponsibility is a primary reason why more people are dying from opioid overdoses in this country right now than are dying in traffic accidents.
Doctors are fueling the nation’s prescription drug epidemic and represent the primary source of narcotic painkillers for chronic abusers, according to a new government study.
The finding challenges a widely held belief that has long guided policymakers: That the epidemic is caused largely by abusers getting their drugs without prescriptions, typically from friends and family.Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducted the study, said the research showed the need for greater focus on doctors who are “problem prescribers.”
The study, published Monday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., echoes a 2012 Times investigation that found drugs prescribed by doctors caused or contributed to nearly half of the prescription overdose deaths in Southern California in recent years.
The Times also revealed that authorities were failing to mine a rich database of prescribing records to identify and stop reckless prescribers.
Frieden said the new study, appearing in JAMA’s Internal Medicine journal, along with The Times investigation and a second JAMA article on the widespread use of narcotic painkillers in Tennessee, all showed that physician prescribing was a key contributor to the crisis of addiction and overdose that has continued to mount since the CDC declared it an epidemic in 2011.
Prescription drugs — mostly narcotic painkillers, such as OxyContin and Vicodin — contribute to more than 16,000 fatal overdoses annually and are the main reason drugs have surpassed traffic accidents as a cause of death in the U.S.
Now, obviously, it’s a problem when a “bad apple” doctor decides to facilitate a patient’s opioid addiction to make an extra buck. But I think the problem is quite a bit deeper than that. There are many, many physicians who are inadvertently creating heroin addicts and causing fatal opioid overdoes without the slightest intention of doing their patients any harm. The problem, as I see it, is that the medical community is not sufficiently aware of how significant of a percentage of people are at risk of developing an opioid addiction if they are prescribed vicodins or percocets or oxy-contin. People are routinely given these medications after relatively minor surgery or dental work. But somewhere around 6% of the people prescribed these drugs are likely to become addicted to them.
The overprescription of these drugs also means that high schools and colleges are absolutely awash with them, and they’ve become a staple of the drug culture commonly taken at weekend parties to supplement the alcohol and marijuana. Most kids can take these drugs without any problem, but about one in twenty of them will wind up addicted to opioids. That may seem like a small number, but if one of every twenty kids who drank on the weekend wound up dying in an automobile accident, the casualty rate would be catastrophic.
I’ve posted about this repeatedly and I’ve provided many links to anecdotal stories. I can’t count how many times I’ve read stories about kids who overdosed on opioids who started out using drugs prescribed by a doctor. Tonsillitis can be a death sentence. Getting your wisdom teeth out can be a death sentence. Having you gall bladder removed can be a death sentence. I’ve seen all of those examples. Those doctors weren’t aware that, when they prescribed a post-operative painkiller, they were going to kill their patients. But that is what they did.
So, yes, we need to crack down on doctors who are corrupt, but we also need to educate honest doctors about the harm they are doing.
And we need someone to develop non-addictive painkillers.
