At least there’s some movement in the health care industry to start cleaning up the deadly mess known as opioid — or painkiller — addiction. A new report led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is finally addressing the systemic failures that have led to an epidemic of addiction and overdose deaths over the past decade.
But the other side of the coin is the alarming spike in heroin use, addiction and death that continues to wreak havoc, as opioid addicts switch to heroin at a fraction of the price and are dying in ever greater numbers. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 2002 and 2013, the rate of heroin-related overdose deaths nearly quadrupled.
“Some of the greatest increases occurred in demographic groups with historically low rates of heroin use: women, the privately insured, and people with higher incomes,” the CDC reported in July 2015 — the sort of people more likely to get a prescription for opioid painkillers.
You can thank Big Pharma, the FDA, the medical establishment and time-pressured docs looking for a quick, um, fix for pain real, imagined and feigned.
As it turns out, a colleague pointed out a recent 60 Minutes report along the same lines.
