Are Prescription PainKillers America’s Most Toxic Drugs?
The Headlines
“The biggest and fastest-growing part of America’s drug problem is prescription drug abuse,” says Robert DuPont, a former White House drug czar and a former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “The statistics are unmistakable.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the misuse and abuse of prescription medication has caused a drastic increase in substance fatal substance overdose. This epidemic has gone generally unrecognized and continues to claims thousands of lives each year around the world. 38,371 people died in 2007 as a result of drug overdose this makes overdose the 10th leading cause of death.
“The death toll is equivalent to a hundred 757s crashing and killing everybody on board every year, but this doesn’t make the news,” said Dan Bigg of the Chicago Recovery Alliance
“The number of overdose deaths from opioid painkillers — opium-like drugs that include morphine and codeine — more than tripled from 1999 to 2006, to 13,800 deaths that year” according to CDC statistics released Wednesday.
“About 120,000 Americans a year go to the emergency room after overdosing on opioid painkillers” says Laxmaiah Manchikanti, chief executive officer and board chairman for the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians.
“In the past, most overdoses were due to illegal narcotics, such as heroin, with most deaths in big cities. Prescription painkillers have now surpassed heroin and cocaine, however, as the leading cause of fatal overdoses” Paulozzi says. “And the rate of fatal overdoses is now about as high in rural areas — 7.8 deaths per 100,000 people — as in cities, where the rate is 7.9 deaths per 100,000 people” according to a paper he published last year in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety.
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