Saturday, November 12, 2016

Narcotic Negligence: A Nation in Crisis

            Convicted in early November for three counts of criminal mistreatment of a child, Ashley Hutt and Mac McIver were sentenced for injecting their 2, 4 and 6 and year old children with heroin. Impoverished, the poor couple was without health insurance and needed to treat their underfed and diaper-rashed children with the only “medicine” they had.

Though their kids are now healthy and safe in child protective services, the sheer shock of the headline is reviving the far too downplayed opioid epidemic plaguing our nation.

            The epicenter of this narcotic crisis isn’t rooted in illegal drug trade, it rather stems a greater cultural dependence on opioids promulgated through the rising popularity of prescription painkillers. We as a country, like Ashley Hutt, use and abuse narcotics as an easy fix to dull our chronic pains.

How did we get here?

Our first mistake begins with “the war on drugs”. The damage of this movement spurred by H.W. Bush and the ‘drug czars’ is not the spike in drug-related incarceration, but in the larger blindsiding narrative. Marked with an asterisk, in reality the battle was against illegal drugs as a reaction to the crack epidemic of the 1980s. As war has been waged against illegal drugs, other narcotics could quietly burgeon outside of public scrutiny, provided it was legally packaged with an FDA seal of approval.

Our second misstep: In the early 90s powerful opioids were scarcely prescribed, only available to cancer and end-of-life pain management. Big pharmaceutical companies realized cancer and end-of-life patients represented a very small portion of a larger target demographic. They changed their marketing strategies, appealing to a broader audience and spending billions marketing directly to doctors to increase prescription numbers – a choice supported by the FDA, and a decision worth $400 billion dollars annually for pharma.

 Our third miscalculation: The most routine surgeries with quick recovery time like wisdom teeth removal or something as simple as a bad back have become targets for painkiller prescriptions. This has led to an exponentially increasing demand for OxyContin and Vicodin consequently the price of prescription painkillers to cost a fraction of heroin. More so it has established painkillers as the panacea to all our problems.

            Combined, over a few decades we created a culture attune to illegal drugs but completely blind to the potential dangers of prescription drugs, while fueling a legal and inexpensive system that annually fills more than 250 million Schedule I prescriptions for nearly 70% of the US population. While not all patients are addicts, we nevertheless have created a culture that dangerously supports opioid dependence.

Like a hydra gaining heads, this national addiction has grown more dangerous and more multifaceted by the year. It’s no longer a simple issue beyond the 30,000 annual opioid related death, but one of child endangerment, suicide rates and increased heroin abuse. Yet we remain frighteningly numb to a crisis in fever pitch.

            Adults are no longer the only victims of opioids, as a new study by JAMA Pediatrics has accounted for a doubling of opioid related poisonings of children from ages 1 to 14 over the past decade, reaching more than 13,000 last year. The prevalence of Vicodin, Percocet, OxyContin among others, has promoted the accidental hospitalization and death of our nation’s youth. Narcotics now account for more childhood accidents than do traffic collisions.

             Beyond accidental overdoses, the readily available compounds have seen suicides rates double over the past decade in the 14 to 24 age ranges, with triple to quadrupled rates among Caucasians. Whether a consequence of addictive behavior or a lethal drug in easy access, the effect is astonishing.

            Ultimately the addictive behaviors and cravings produced by these drugs often lead to the abuse of harder drugs like heroin. Today, 75% of heroin users say they began by abusing prescription drugs. And in the end it goes to show that our dependence on narcotics isn’t one determined by legality, but an umbrella of addiction and a culture obsessed.

This epidemic poses a problem without a clear solution. Despite their dangerous potential, these opioid drugs serve an important medical purpose for our sickest individuals. Though outright ban would halt the drug flow, it would disservice a significant portion of our most infirm population.


To find any solution we must understand this is an issue of culture, and not the chemicals. Change begins with reversing our need to prescribe a painkiller for any and all maladies; a reformulation within pharmaceutical ethics to cease marketing them as cure-alls; the government to taking ownership of our war on drugs, notwithstanding the legality of the abused substance.

1 comment:

  1. Spencer, I think you're so right. But then again, when aren't you? You're blog is incredibly edifying.

    Indeed, the culture is much more important then the chemical. As Dr. Carl Hart says, rich people do as many drugs as poor people, yet they are still successful and responsible. I think we can look to Michael Harrington's culture of poverty to see why drug use amongst the poor is so much worse than drug use among the rich.

    To fix the problem of parents injecting heroin in their children's veins, we cannot crackdown on drug use. What we need to do is propose an economic plan that can educate people so they don't do foolish things with drugs.

    Drugs aren't the problems. People should be allowed to responsibly use drugs in the privacy of their homes (or at a music festival). The problem is poverty--plain and simple.

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