The use of opioids in the United States is one of the biggest social illnesses of the twenty-first century. It has killed at least hundreds of thousands of Australians directly, upended communities, and burdened the nation’s healthcare systems.
Knowledge of the causes or effects of the numerous activities that make up the prevention and mitigation of this calamity is important to deal with the continuous effects of the crisis in society.
The Origins of the Opioid Crisis
Its origin can be dated back to the late 1990s when some companies flooded the market with prescription opioids as a treatment for chronic pain. These companies guarantee healthcare providers that opioids, for example, oxycodone and hydrocodone, are safe and do not induce risks of addiction in case they are used appropriately.
The Marketing Campaign
Consequently, doctors were prescribing those drugs to an extent that had never been seen before. The marketing campaigns were backed up by favourable research, which dismissed the prospects of opioid addiction.
The New England Journal of Medicine published a study in 1980, which became frequently used by both drug companies and healthcare institutions to justify the massive distribution of opioids. The study, however, er was done on a small and selective sample of patients, thus arriving at a faulty conclusion that aggravated the problem of opioid prescription.
The Impact of the Opioid Crisis
Reporting officials have described the fallout from the opioid calamity as grievous, in mere lives lost, and in social cost.
Public Health
The deaths due to the overdoses are the most blatant and the most immediate outcome that the opioid crisis has had. From CDC data, it emerged that at least 444,000 to 500,000 people succumbed to opioid overdose between the years 1999 to 2019. Thus, the unfavourable developments in this sphere are unfolded in stages; each stage can be mentioned with the help of such names as prescription opioids, heroin, synthetic opioids, and fentanyl.
Fentanyl
Among them, fentanyl is a major factor in the sharp surge in overdose mortality in the recent past. It is one of the opioids – a synthetic substance that is up to four times stronger than morphine, which means that even with small doses of fentanyl, there is a high risk of fatal overdose.
Fentanyl has only complicated the opioid crisis more because it is often cut with other substances and thus has caused many accidental overdoses.
Economic Costs
The issue of opioids also has a significant impact on the economy. The general expenses related to opioid use, among other things, including medical costs for treatment, policing costs, lost productivity due to opioid u,se and overdose, have been approximated in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers
In 2018, the White House Council of Economic Advisers put the economic toll of the opioid crisis at an astronomical 696 billion dollars or 3% of the nation’s GDP. The cost share for that year was 4 per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product, or GDP.
The consequences are most acute in healthcare systems. Admittance to Intensive Care Units and emergency rooms, and enrollment in long-term opioid use disorder have stretched the healthcare systems to their limit. Also, the criminal justice system has been stretched to capacity by the new cases of drug-related incidents; thus, the economic cost of the crisis is also well illustrated.
Social Consequences
Of course, the statistics alone do not tell the whole story; opioids and related drugs have devastated families and neighbourhoods. Children of addicted parents are likely to be taken to foster care homes, thus increasing the number of children in foster care.
In particular, members of communities with average income levels, and living in rural districts, are the most affected, as people suffer from high rates of addiction and experience the social consequences of narcotic use, such as increased crime rate and deteriorated living conditions.
There is also the aspect of stigma, which has made it difficult for many persons to seek he, adding to the crisis.
Pharmaceutical Companies and the Health Care Facilities
The following discussion will show how the pharmaceutical companies were instrumental in the making of the opioid crisis. Drug manufacturers such as Purdue Pharma, which manufactures OxyContin, have been named as having masqueraded their opioids as safe and with low addiction potential.
Pharmacies such as Purdue Pharma have been on the receiving end and have been sued severally for their involvement in the crisis, and have since declared bankruptcy and have so far offered to pay billions of US dollars towards compensation for the affected victims and communities.
Widespread Criticism
These companies’ actions have therefore elicited widespread criticism and litigation. The U. S. Department of Justice revealed in 2020 that it had settled with Purdue Pharma, for the said company to pay more than $8 billion in fines and damages.
However, many people have expressed that this settlement fails to solve not only the individual cases and losses but also the whole damage that has been done by the company’s actions.
The abductors of the crisis are healthcare providers who were influenced by the high-intensity marketing of opioids by the pharmaceutical industry and who prescribed opioids to manage patient pain.
Abuse of Opioids
Even efforts to stem the abuse of opioids failed due to the excess supply of opioids that were prescribed to encourage the excess supply of opioids which could easily be tapped into the black market.
They became widely accessible for the initial development of the stages of the crisis, especially as they played the role of a legitimate medical pipeline for illicit drug abuse. Because of the fast-growing problem, the usage of opioids among healthcare providers has changed in a big way within a short span.
Healthcare System
Contemporary directives and recommendations made by numerous organisations, including the CDC, are to restrict the utilisation of opioids and seek the usage of other pain management treatments.
Still, it has left the healthcare system with the problem of overprescription, seen today through the millions of Americans dependent on opioids.
Measures Against Opioid Epidemics
There have been many initiatives organised by federal, state, and local authorities, healthcare system representatives, law enforcement bodies, and other public entities in the course of the struggle against the opioid epidemic.
Legislation and Regulation
However, the U.S. government at the federal level has implemented the following measures to curb the vice.
The Substance Use-Disorder Prevention that Promotes Opioid Recovery and Treatment for Patients and Communities (SUPPORT) Act of 2018 was ambitious, too, and included prevention, treatment, recovery, and related functions.
The ‘SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act’ enacted in 2018 went further to expand the opportunity for treatment and prevention of addictions.
The state governments have also not been relenting, and several states of the United States have since instituted prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) to monitor opioid prescription practices.
These programs are useful when it comes to the reduction of the use of opioids. However, some challenges are still faced when it comes to the appropriate care of patients who may need opioid analgesics for the management of their pain.
Treatment and Recovery
Another valuable approach to fighting the opioid crisis is the enhancement of the availability of treatment and recovery services.
While methadone and buprenorphine are currently used to manage opioid dependency and addiction, counselling and behavioural therapies, when used together, are generally referred to as medication-assisted treatment or MAT.
But still, there are restrictions on the use of MAT, especially in remote and hard-to-reach places. The harm reduction approach has also been more common over time, including the rationing of naloxone, which is an overdose medication for opioids.
Naloxone has been a godsend all over the country thanks to its efficiency in reversing and perhaps even saving hundreds of lives attributable to an overdose, but the availability and accessibility of the same are random across the entire country.
Public Awareness and Education
Awareness campaigns have been some of the best efforts in educating the public about opioid use and pushing people seekfor help.
The awareness campaigns are conducted to lessen the prejudice that is often accorded to drug addicts and to accept that they suffer from a disease known as substance dependency and deserve compassion and medical help.
They have also directed campaigns to educate healthcare providers on appropriate prescribing practices as well as the available and more appropriate ways of managing pain than opioids.
Education and training for healthcare personnel should not stop in the present to avoid such happenings in the future and guarantee the safety of patients who are normally treated by healthcare providers.
Conclusion
The opioid crisis in America can be best described as a social evil that is uncontainable because it is caused by more than one factor. There continue to be drawbacks, especially in the case of helping opioid-addicted persons achieve the necessary changes in their lives to give them the desired chance at a decent existence.
The crisis has revealed many problems in the sphere of medicine, especially in the organisation of medical care and the problem of regulating pharmaceutical companies. It has also brought out the realisation of the need to treat substance use disorder as a disease of public health rather than criminal justice.
Future initiatives need to fight the crisis to build on new research and effective practices that can be implemented to fight and prevent the underlying causes of substance dependence and to prevent further deaths. You can read further the similar posts on the news page of the site.
Editors
adminate
