While Donald Trump waves his hand vaguely at opioid drug addiction and ignores his own opioid-addiction panel’s recommendations, Bob Mercer notices this new report from the South Dakota Department of Health featuring, among other things, this map of opioid painkiller prescriptions in South Dakota:
Apparently the biggest town in South Dakota where one might expect to find lots of prescribed opioids is Yankton, followed by Huron and Pierre. Aberdeen, Brookings, and Vermillion, all university towns, appear to be among the lowest opioid-prescribing communities.
Our SD Health pulls this map from a larger nationwide map of opioid prescription by county in 2015 from the CDC:
An August 1, 2017, JAMA report says, “Proven strategies are available to manage chronic pain effectively without opioids, and changing prescribing practices is an important step in addressing the opioid overdose epidemic and its adverse effects on US communities.” Another CDC map of changes in opioids prescribed per capita indicates that nearly half of the counties with surveyable data made progress toward that goal by prescribing fewer opioids:
CDC says 86.5% of surveyable counties showed decreases in prescriptions of high doses of opioids. 72.1% of counties saw decreases in the opioid amounts in daily prescriptions. However, 73.5% of counties saw increases in the average days’s supply of opioids prescribed by doctors.
Now I sure don’t want to take any opioids, and I’ll tell my daughter not to touch them. But “talking to youth and telling them: no good, really bad for you in every way” isn’t going to stop opioid addictions that start with doctors prescribing opioids:
A series of studies, however, have found one of the key variables in opioid addiction is a doctor’s prescription, with many overdose deaths stemming from prescription opioid medications.
In 2014 alone, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 14,000 people died from overdoses involving prescription opioids. The same study found that as many as 25% of people who receive prescription opioids for long term non-cancer care deals with addiction [Dan Merica, “Trump Says Don’t Start Opioids to Avoid Addiction, But Often They Are Prescribed,” CNN.com, 2017.08.08].
Opioid addiction appears not demand wagging our fingers at naughty children. We might do more good wagging our fingers and some hefty fines at the pharmaceutical execs making big bucks pushing drugs on us.
~Pain pill abuse is especially high among women who often abuse the medicine as a low calorie substitute for alcohol. Weight gain is minimized and the euphoria is similar.
~The data suggest that women progress from opioid (pain pills) use to dependence more quickly than men, suffer more severe emotional and physical consequences of drug use as compared to men, yet underutilized treatment.
~ The estimated annual cost of prescription opioid abuse in the U.S. is $9.2 billion. More indirect societal costs of opioid abuse can also be seen, for example, in hospital emergency departments where patients with legitimate pain are sometimes [denied access] to pain relieving medications due to concerns regarding abuse liability.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3164783/
Careful, Porter: if we go saying women are different from men, Google may fire us… or block our discussion from its search results. ;-)
If I wasn’t allowed to GOOGLE my life would be much less rewarding. I believe women are smarter than men in every way. They experience problems when they can’t move beyond their jealousy of other women. (One of Hillary’s big hurdles.) Psychology says it’s due to their genetic disposition to provide the best opportunity for their kids.
Opioid Abuse Is Plummeting In States With Legal Marijuana – Opioid abuse and dependence in states with medical marijuana are roughly 23 percent lower than states without legal access, reports NBC News.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/28/opioid-abuse-is-plummeting-in-states-with-legal-marijuana/