It's was and still is an opioid crisis, and it was started with the Sackler family. Purdue Pharma worked with the Joint Commission to make pain the "5th vital sign" so doctors would be compelled to over-prescribe the "non-addictive" opioid pain relievers. It turns out the pills were highly addictive, and from suburban housewives to punk teenagers, opioid abuse became rampant at all levels of society. But when the pills stop flowing, the addiction did not, and the users went to what was readily available, heroin and now fentanyl. People are not starting out with fentanyl and heroin, they're resorting to it because they got hooked on narcotics. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2635622
I’ve said this on this forum for half a decade lol. but that info is also 5 years too late. The pressure on under prescribing is greater than ever before, the people getting ducked are those with chronic pain etc who will resort street drugs if they can’t have their medical issues treated
There’s certainly a lot to that but opiods have always been a problem going back to Opium addiction in the 19th C. Fentanyl is more powerful and cheaper than heroin or other opiods so no surprise it’s become so widespread even without legal opiods
Folks will always look to substances to ease their pain (mental and physical). Legalize mar1juana, it’s certainly not harmless, but the risk management is wildly different than opioids, meth, etc.
Odd, aren't there other pain relievers out there or are they all relatively addictive and destructive over time? Rush got addicted to Oxy. Was that opiate just as bad? Just wondering what a correct solution is.
Heroin and opium were never mainstream drugs. Fentanyl without oral prescriptions would have never become mainstream. When a regulatory body, in this case non-governmental, is captured by financial interests of a group seeking to profit from the regulated organizations (Perdue lobbying to make pain the fifth vital, hospitals and physicians being penalized for under treating pain) you get a recipe for disaster. The teenage culture over the last teen years elevated and celebrated musicians openly bragging about getting high on pharmaceutical supplied opioids and benzodiazepines. Once the kids (party scene) or your peers (injury) or your grandparents (surgery) feel that euphoria from their first medically prescribed high, they can end up going to dark places to chase that high including accidentally killings themselves with heroin and now fentanyl. This is not a fentanyl issue, it’s an opioid issue.
I can recommend Empire of Pain as a well-reported and interesting read. But it's all hella depressing.
Fentanyl is a made up term by right wing media groups, its not real. Biden has the strongest policies possibly ever on drugs and immigration and the best economy ever dur dur dur..... Wokes are mentirosos, tryin bs Biden into being competent.
Should have invited you to my dinner with the Fastows, one of the most uncomfortable meals of my life.
They’re all the same synthetic vs non-synthetic opioids, some more euphoric than others. Potency differs, fentanyl doses in micrograms vs milligrams for morphine. The crackdown on opioid prescribing isn’t helping imo, I think had this been in effect 2 decades ago it would have helped but anybody and everybody is making fentanyl it looks like
China has been accused of dumping fentanyl into our borders. They still do though I'm not sure if it's state sponsored sabotage or pure greed.
Chinese and American chemists are working with Mexican cartels to sell them the raw inputs to manufacture fentanyl for eventual distribution in the US. Afghanistan is working with the Mexican cartels to sell opium poppies to manufacture heroin for eventual distribution in the US. Pharmaceuticals including Perdue Pharma and Mallinckrodt are making highly addictive oral opioids for distribution in the US. Heroin is over a 100 years old. Fentanyl has been on the market for over 50 years. Oxycontin comes out in 1995 and changes the face of opioid addiction forever. There is a big leap from chasing highs from a tablet to chasing highs from an injection. Without the oral opioid addiction crisis, there would be no excess demand for either heroin or fentanyl. The Sackler family both knew and suppressed the evidence showing they were selling a highly addicting medication due to unchecked greed. Their greed and ability to shape the message to their benefit permanently harmed our society. https://www.businessinsider.com/fda-chief-approved-oxycontin-six-figure-gig-at-purdue-pharma-2021-5 An FDA official who led the approval of OxyContin got a $400,000 gig at Purdue Pharma a year later, a new book reveals https://www.jointcommission.org/-/m...?db=web&hash=E7D12A5C3BE9DF031F3D8FE0D8509580 "Changes in Prescription Opioid Use Immediately after the release of the standards in 2001, some raised concerns that the standards could lead to inappropriate use of opioids.24 Total opioid prescriptions had been steadily increasing in the U.S. for at least a decade before the standards were released (see Figure 1 below).31 Between 1991 and 1997, the number of prescriptions increased from 76 million to 97 million. This was likely due to advocacy work by pain experts, as described above. From 1997 to 2013, the rate of increase appears to have been somewhat more rapid. Some of this acceleration in the rate of increase in opioid prescribing may have been due to the 1995 approval of the new sustained-release opioid OxyContin.32 The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved labeling saying that iatrogenic addiction was “very rare” and that the delayed absorption of OxyContin reduced the abuse liability of the drug.32 These same claims were used in marketing campaigns to physicians and in more than 40 national pain-management and speaker training conferences for which all expenses were paid.32 The FDA required removal of these unsubstantiated claims from OxyContin’s labeling in 2001. However, the concept that iatrogenic addiction was rare and that long-acting opioids were less addictive had been greatly reinforced and widely repeated, and studies refuting these claims were not publish until several years later.33,34 Because of the steady rise in opioid prescriptions in the decade preceding release of The Joint Commission standards and the other forces encouraging opioid prescribing in the years before the release of the standards, it is difficult to draw conclusions about whether the standards or educational materials related to the standards had an independent effect on the upward trend."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-65506087 Mexico claims proof of Chinese fentanyl smuggling
