Tag Archives: opioids

In 2019 the age-adjusted death rate from an opioid overdose was 21.6 per 100,000 people. This compares with 12.9 for kidney disease, 14.2 from suicides, 14.7 for influenza, 21.6 from diabetes, and 161.5 from heart disease (the leading cause of death in the United States). Opioid overdose deaths place in the top 10 leading causes of death in the United States. As can been from Figure 1, prior to 2015 most of these opioid deaths arose from prescription (Rx) overdoses, but after that they came...

That is a pretty dumb question. There are still some who claim they are not even to blame or responsible after a couple of decades of Pharma spreading around this poison. Now some are trying to make the others who are restricting the use of legal drugs the enemy. Some opening points before I get into the next part of this entitled topic. In 2015, 227 million prescriptions were written for opioids such as OxyContin, Vicodin, and Fentanyl. This...

This topic is blowing up in the news. Politicians claiming recipients are laying out cash for drugs and other unneeded things. Funny thing, they didn’t give a damn when 20 million hydrocodone and oxycodone tabs showed up at five pharmacies in 4 small towns having a total population of ~22000 in 2016. Gotta keep those pharma contributions rolling into their campaign funds. I featured this in a 2018 post, if you read it . . . How are Low Income...

“The Justice Department moved on Thursday to block a bankruptcy plan that grants broad legal immunity to the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, whose drug OxyContin has been at the heart of the nation’s opioid epidemic. William K. Harrington, the U.S. trustee for the Justice Department, filed a motion in federal court to halt confirmation of the settlement while the department appeals the judge’s decision to approve the deal. In writing...

A little history: In 1980, the Porter and Jick letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine by the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program stated: “the risk of addiction was low when opioids such as oxycodone were prescribed for chronic pain.” It was a brief statement by the doctors conducting the study, taken out of context, and cited many times afterwards as justification for the use of oxycodone. In a June 1, 2017 letter to the...

Here’s is a PBS commentary by law professor Ekow Yankah: That Kroger, the Midwestern grocery chain, has decided to make the heroin overdose drug naloxone available without a prescription is a sign of how ominous the current epidemic has grown. Faced with a rising wave of addiction, misery, crime and death, our nation has linked arms to save souls. Senators and CEOs, Midwestern pharmacies and even tough-on-crime Republican presidential candidates now speak...