Prescription: Death

I wonder how much "support" the major pharmaceutical companies gave to the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations when they recommended that doctors should initiate discussions about pain management with all their patients. From the UK Daily Mail:

Fifteen years ago, a report by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, a nationally recognized medical society which accredits hospitals, stressed that pain was vastly undertreated in the United States.

The report recommended that physicians routinely assess pain at every patient visit.

It also suggested that opioids could be effectively and more broadly used without fear of addiction.

Of course there were pain medications available for this. Lots and lots of medications.

The report was heavily publicized, and today it is widely acknowledged that it led to massive – and sometimes inappropriate – increases in the use of prescription opioid drugs to treat pain.

With more opioids being prescribed by well-meaning doctors, some were diverted from the legal supply chain – through theft from medicine cabinets or trade on the black market – to the street for illicit use.

As more opioids leaked out, more people started to experiment with them for recreational purposes.

This increase in supply certainly explains a large part of the current opioid abuse epidemic, but it doesn't explain all of it.

Oxycontin is one of those medications and Perdue Pharma has made billions from it.

According to the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians, Americans consume 80 percent of the world’s pain pills.1 Misleading pain statistics are used to push increasingly stronger narcotics into the marketplace.

Since OxyContin was introduced in 1996, Canada has recorded the second-highest number of prescription opioid painkiller addictions and the world's second-highest death rate from overdoses. In the US, narcotic overdose deaths now surpass deaths from murders and fatal car accidents.

[...] Because of its insatiable demand, some patients with legal prescriptions begin selling OxyContin tablets to drug dealers for a profit. The pharmaceutical company earned billions while watching their “miracle drug” turn ordinary citizens into hardened addicts and criminals.

How many people have died as a result of OxyContin? A firm number is difficult to ascertain. A variety of numbers have appeared in media reports, usually lacking citations or references, and many deaths involve a combination of drugs and alcohol.3

What is known is that narcotic overdose deaths have quadrupled in the last decade. Deaths from overdoses of drugs like hydrocodone (Vicodin), morphine, and oxycodone/OxyContin rose from 1.4 per 100,000 in 1999 to 5.4 per 100,000 in 2011.

In 2009, 1.2 million emergency department visits involved the “nonmedical use of pharmaceuticals or dietary stimulants” (which includes abuse). Oxycodone alone or in combination with other drugs accounted for 175,949 of those visits.

When crack cocaine hit American cities in the mid 1980's it quickly became the drug of choice. Now heroin has come roaring back in a big way. This taste for opioids was no doubt fueled by prescription drugs such as Oxycontin. Our county is the poster child for fatal drug overdoses.

So Ya Wanna Ba A Junkie

So ya wanna be a junkie? The kindest thing you can do for yourself, your family, your community and your country is to blow your brains out.

Now. Do it right now.
Save everyone the trouble of putting up with your self-destructive BS and the yoyo-ing in and out of expensive drug rehab. Just put the gun to your temple or wait for the next bus to came barreling down the street, hunt for a high bridge or stick your head inside a garbage bag. Use your imagination.

Or hook up with a crocodile.

Russia has more heroin users than any other country in the world – up to two million, according to unofficial estimates. For most, their lot is a life of crime, stints in prison, probable contraction of HIV and hepatitis C, and an early death. As efforts to stem the flow of Afghan heroin into Russia bring some limited success, and the street price of the drug goes up, for those addicts who can't afford their next hit, an even more terrifying spectre has raised its head.

The home-made drug that Oleg and Sasha inject is known as krokodil, or "crocodile". It is desomorphine, a synthetic opiate many times more powerful than heroin that is created from a complex chain of mixing and chemical reactions, which the addicts perform from memory several times a day.

[...]It is a drug for the poor, and its effects are horrific. It was given its reptilian name because its poisonous ingredients quickly turn the skin scaly. Worse follows. Oleg and Sasha have not been using for long, but Oleg has rotting sores on the back of his neck.

And it's here, in America. It is made by mixing codeine with gasoline, paint thinner, iodine, hydrochloric acid and red phosphorous. After sustained abuse of this mixture, the skin starts to rot and eventually just falls away.

There are pictures (google "desomorphine addiction" if you're interested) of Russian addicts where both leg bones - tibia and fibula - are exposed as the rotting flesh and muscle have completely fallen off. Same thing for arms - the radial and ulnar bones completely exposed. I've never seen anything like it. It is truly a horror show.

Krokodil is responsible for killing 30,000 Russians a year where it has become very popular over the past four years, but two cases of desomorphine addiction were discovered in Arizona this week. Public health officials are worried that this is just the beginning. Desomorphine is extremely addictive, much more so than heroin and the detoxification process is three times as long. Codeine is not a controlled substance in Russia but in America it is regulated. Hopefully this will keep its use to a minimum.