“Overdose deaths from carfentanil…[increased] from 29 between January and June 2023 to 238 in that same period in 2024.” That’s a heck of a year-over-year increase, although it still represents only a small percentage of total fatalities.
A logical starting place for a community concerned about drug use would be with data collected by their own health departments and criminal justice agencies, with the aim of funding and implementing a continuum of services that reflects the actual (and likely future) needs of their own citizens.
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In some instances involving the elderly, the practitioner thinks treatment isn’t worth the effort. “I don’t see the point, especially when she may not have that much time left anyway,”
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Make it a continuing effort, using strategies based in evidence, and harnessing the power of human interaction– instead of relying on a burst of anti-drug education, however intense.
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Ironically, the same research indicates that those opioids chronic pain patients depended on weren’t really doing much for their pain.
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…it’s a story I must have heard a thousand times from people in treatment. Drug addicts getting together to form a mutual ‘support system’ for drug use.
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How’s the saying go? “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
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Still, “pill mills” do continue to exist, if not in the numbers they once did. I suppose they could stage a comeback — the economics still work.
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Professional treatment is by definition time-limited; recovery is not. That journey doesn’t end. Peer-based support is often better able to meet future needs.
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…a number of years ago, the Institute of Medicine set forth guidelines intended to reduce the influence of advertising on how physicians prescribed medications… to date, relatively few physicians have actually adopted those guidelines.
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But if he feels he needs the medication to function normally, I see no reason for the rest of us to object. I mean, we don’t want to disincentivize someone’s recovery, do we?
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…they may have purchased what they believe to be cocaine, or methamphetamine, or heroin, any or all of which may have been ‘cut’ with fentanyl or another uber-potent synthetic opioid, in sufficient quantity to overcome their tolerance and put them in imminent danger of death.
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A lone physician was found to have prescribed more than 500,000 doses of prescription opioids to assorted patients in little more than two years of medical practice.
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