By Karoun Demirjian and Lenny Bernstein
The effort is critical to bringing about “a culture shift for patients and doctors.”
The effort is critical to bringing about “a culture shift for patients and doctors.”
A quiet drug problem among older adults, Despite warnings of overdose from experts, prescriptions continue for common anti-anxiety and sleep medications.
BY PAULA SPAN • NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE | reprinted in The Bulletin, March 30, 2018
At first, the pills helped her feel so much better. Jessica Falstein, an artist living in Manhattan, learned she had an anxiety disorder in 1992. It led to panic attacks, a racing pulse, sleeplessness. “Whenever there was too much stress, the anxiety would become almost intolerable, like acid in the veins,” she recalled. When a psychopharmacologist prescribed the drug Klonopin, everything brightened. “It just leveled me out,” Falstein said. “I had more energy. And it helped me sleep, which I was desperate for.”
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The NIH, physicians at Yale, VA Connecticut Healthcare System, Hershey Medical Center, University of Toronto, Sunnybrook Research Institute, and Institute of Clinical Evaluative Services chime in on the opioid pandemic and how the solutions need more critical approaches than currently being promulgated,
Salem, OR—Governor Kate Brown has tasked Senior Policy Advisor Jeff Rhoades with leading a statewide effort to combat opioid abuse and dependency, she announced today. Rhoades will create a task force consisting of medical experts, drug treatment specialists, and government officials to identify and implement efforts to address the growing opioid misuse and abuse across the state.
Click here for the Governor's office announcement
Over the past decade, opioid producers and suppliers have spent more than $880 million at the federal and state level lobbying lawmakers to stop new regulations on their drugs, while calling on policymakers to actually loosen access to painkillers. That’s eight times as much as the gun lobby spent on its causes, according to Mother Jones. And it often worked: In Maine, for example, drugmakers successfully pushed for a bill that required insurers to cover opioid painkillers that are supposedly harder to abuse.
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In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was argued “largely on moral grounds” that opioids should be available for chronic pain. The management model that was adopted was based on the success of opioids for acute and end-of-life pain: a “titrate-to-effect” principle was applied, and a numerical rating became the chief metric. Pain came to be known as the “fifth vital sign” that the pharmaceutical industry exploited to promote narcotic use. We thus caused a man-made opioid epidemic. This report pleads for the FDA to regulate the pharmaceutical industry's ability to promote narcotics and related drugs.
