9.4.10: Opioid Crisis
- Page ID
- 212751
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The legalization of marijuana invites many questions about how legalization affects addiction to more lethal drugs, like heroin. After all, the recent spike in heroin abuse in the US evolved from the legal distribution of opioid pain medications. In the 1990s, millions of Americans were newly diagnosed with chronic pain. Doctors treated over 100 million people with a variety of painkillers, including Percocet, Vicodin, Oxycodone, and other opioid-based pain management drugs.
Figure US The rate of drug overdoses by state shows a reasonably strong correlation with the rate of prescription marking. West Virginia is a wed- known terminus of the Oxycodone express
In Florida, where many elderly people with age-related chronic pain live, became the pain medicine capital of the US during the 1990s. The huge number of elderly patients in Florida provided masked the fact that hundreds of unscrupulous doctors and pharmacists were making huge profits by over-prescribing opioid drugs to drug dealers who posed as chronic pain patients. By 2009, doctors in Florida were prescribing ten times the number of Oxycodone or “Oxycotin” pills than doctors in the rest of the country combined. Drug dealers from all over the eastern half of the United States were making regular trips to Florida to visit dozens of pain clinics where they would pick up dozens of fraudulent prescriptions, many of which were filled by pharmacists in the doctor’s office. These opioid drugs bought in Florida were later sold on the streets and abused by people taking them without a prescription. As a result, several transportation routes to Florida’s pill mills, including air routes and Interstate 75 were dubbed, “The OxyContin Express”.
In recent years, more aggressive policing of pill mills, and a reformulation of Oxycodone created a scarcity of many prescription pain pills, which drove up the price for them on the street, and in turn invited those addicted to prescription pain pills to turn to cheaper, but more deadly alternatives to prescription opioids, including heroin, Fentanyl and a host of other synthetic opioids made in “labs” run by crime syndicates in the US, Mexico, and China. As a result, drug overdoses from opioids (prescription and illegal) have gone up from about 6 per 100,000 in 1999 to over 21 per 100,000 in 2017. The US Congress and state governments have been slow to act.
Figure US Map Florida was for many years hotbed of so called “ pill mil” doctors and pharmacies that make huge profits from prescriptions pales medication that become street drugs.