Five ways you can help fight the opioid epidemic

It is rare these days to scan the healthcare newswire on any given day and not find a story focused upon the prescription opioid abuse epidemic which is plaguing our country. So dramatic is this problem that in 2014, drug overdose overtook automobile accidents as the leading cause of accidental death in the U.S., with 47,055 lethal drug overdoses, according to the CDC. The death toll however tells only half the story.  According to the national data, an additional 4.5 million Americans are estimated as being addicted to opioid prescription pain relievers, according to a study published in Annual Review of Public Health.

As the nation’s opioid epidemic continues to intensify, consider joining trailblazers from health plans, pharmacies and healthcare companies at CBI’s inaugural Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs. This summit will focus on the crucial elements of managing how drugs are prescribed, dispensed and reimbursed.

CalabreseUnlike other conditions, prescription opioid addiction is unique for several reasons. Foremost, it does not discriminate by race, ethnicity, gender, age or socioeconomic status. The victims are our sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, moms and dads, friends and coworkers.  Secondly, it is a condition with prevalence rate that is growing at an alarming pace and cure rate which remains woefully low. Lastly, and most tragically, it is considered to be a condition largely brought upon by the healthcare system itself and our failure to protect individuals from the dangers of indiscriminate prescribing and consumption of these drugs.

How did we get here?

Physicians trained in the 1960s and 1970s were taught to reserve opioids for the most severe forms of pain, such as cancer or end-of-life care. In the late 1990s however, opioid prescribing policies changed. Patient advocacy groups and pain specialists began to argue that doctors were undertreating common forms of pain that could benefit from opioids, such as backaches and joint pain. Around this same time the American Pain Society introduced the Pain as the 5th Vital Sign campaign.  This effort garnered impressive institutional support, and not surprisingly, was further amplified by multimillion-dollar, physician-directed promotional campaigns, largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry.  New, long-acting drugs like OxyContin were promoted as less addictive, according to the organization Shatterproof, a national organization committed to preventing substance use disorder and facilitating access to evidence-based treatments without shame or stigma for those afflicted.    

This promotional campaign has since been considered one of the biggest mistakes in modern medicine. Between 1999 and 2014, sales of prescription opioids in the U.S. increased by over 400%.  During this same time, a strong, linear relationship was established between opioid sales volume and the steady growth in U.S. morbidity and mortality rates associated with these products, according to the CDC. Whatever advantages gained in alleviating pain in subsets of the population were vastly overwhelmed by the subsequent epidemic of addiction and overdose.

Internal server error