From The LA Times:
Overdose deaths from abuse of prescription painkillers in the U.S. now outnumber deaths involving heroin and cocaine combined, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday.
In 2008, drug overdoses caused 36,450 deaths in the U.S. One or more prescription drugs were involved in 20,044 of these deaths, CDC researchers wrote in the journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Opioid pain relievers, including oxycodone, methadone and hydrocodone, were involved in 14,800...
In 2010, 4.8% of Americans 12 years or older used opioid pain relievers nonmedically -- that is, without a prescription or purely for the feeling the drug causes. The report calculated that by 2010, "enough opioid pain relievers were sold to medicate every American adult with a typical dose of 5 mg of hydrocodone every four hours one month."
That last bit doesn't make sense, why "one month" right at the end, but I think what they mean is a lot of painkillers were sold.
Unfortunately, even though this is a splendid headline, the simple comparison between number of deaths caused by X and by Y is fairly meaningless unless we know the number of people taking X and the number taking Y. It may well be that two hundred million Americans take painkillers every day, but only (say) ten million people use heroin or cocaine, in which case the latter are still more dangerous (on a personal level) than legally available painkillers.
Wednesday 2 November 2011
Prescription painkillers cause more deaths than heroin and cocaine
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7 comments:
Could a clue here be that painkillers are generally taken by people who are already ill, that's why they take them.
Recreational drugs - addicts excepted - are more often taken for pleasure by people who are otherwise well.
Ill people are more likely to die.
W42, as I said, it is a splendid headline but it crumbles a bit on closer examination, once we adjust for respective number of users and pre-existing conditions etc.
We would also need to know how many of those 20,000 odd ahd ONLY taken prescription medicines. Junkies will take analgesics and tranquilizers along with or instead of heroin when they can get hold of them.
Has anyone EVER been mugged by an Ibrufen addict.
Talk about the cart leading the horse. It's not the death toll but the misery and mayhem caused by the genuine drug addict during "it's" lifetime - however short that may be.
The worst trait of the person in pain is to bore the arse off people with their tales of woe.
CI, true.
Anon, I doubt whether muggees make polite enquiries, but I assume Ibuprofen addicts commit relatively few crimes BECAUSE the stuff is relatively cheap and easily available.
So let's make heroine & cocaine easily available (and hence cheap, the stuff costs pennies to make, there's plenty of room to slap a tax on it) and hey presto, far fewer crimes committed to raise the money for H&C.
MW: When will you ever learn, such headlines logic would never result in a liberalisation of what people may choose to put in their own bodies. All things must be medicalised, regulated, restricted and banned.
Of course the other side of this rather revolting coin is the mass medicalisation of people "for their own good". Personal soverereignty over your own body?
Never you might even start to think for yourself then ...
This sounds like someone is shaping up for a ban.
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