WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS, WV: At last weekend’s
summer meeting of the National Governors Association there was an unexpected
bipartisan call to arms against drug abuse.
Oklahoma’s Republican governor Mary Fallin described the
prescription drug epidemic as “the enemy within,” a threat to national security
equal to Islamic terror. Steve
Beshear, Kentucky’s Democratic governor, stunned the audience with the
statistic that more Americans are dying from drug overdoses than die on the
nation’s highways.
As governors from up two-dozen states listened, Dr. Debra
Houry from the Centers for Disease Control said drug overdoses caused 145,000
deaths over the past decade. It is an epidemic, she said, spreading at an
alarming rate with “drug related deaths up by 400% since 1999.”
Despite appeals to hold back, she said physicians continue
to overprescribe powerful painkillers, which in medical terms are opioids, addictive
opium-related synthetic compounds whose excessive use impacts the brain like
heroin. She said 260 million prescriptions for pain killers were written in
2012, “enough for every adult in the country to have his own bottle of pills.” Common
painkillers are Oxycontin, Percocet and Vicodin.
Dr. Houry cited research showing that the recent upsurge in
heroin use is connected to the overuse of painkillers. Pain pill abusers, she
said, are 40 times more likely than others to move on to heroin.
Connecticut’s Democratic governor Dannel Malloy said heroin
use has exploded because it is cheaper than painkillers. The heroin now on the streets, he said,
is so pure that it is increasingly killing first time users, often young people
between 17 and 26. This cohort, “ who think they’ll live forever,” typically
become addicted by first snorting crushed pills.
Pointing to research that most abusers initially get pills
from friends and relatives, Malloy called on doctors “to stop writing long-term
prescriptions.” If painkillers are prescribed for only a brief period for
dental extractions, he said, that should also be the case for those who have
had knee or hip replacements.
Former California Republican congresswoman Mary Bono, whose
son suffered from substance abuse, said if 100 dolphins washed up everyday on
Florida beaches there would be a national outcry. Yet, she said, even more
Americans—43,000—are dying annually from drug overdoses.
Governor Rick Snyder, Michigan Republican, agreed that the
scope of the problem is huge. “When I recently asked sheriffs in rural Michigan
what is their number one problem,” he said, “they replied prescription drug
abuse.”
Lieutenant Patrick Glynn, a drug specialist at the Quincy,
MA police department, emphasized treatment and said drug abuse is a disease and
not a crime. But he said people “have too many pills in the medicine cabinet,”
often the first target of addicts breaking into homes.
Glynn is a proponent of first responders carrying narcon
(Naloxone), a quick response drug that reverses the effects of opioid poisoning
which attack receptors in the brain, causing the user to stop breathing.
Health and Human Services secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell
told the governors the Obama administration wants to devote an additional $100
million to fight the drug addiction epidemic.
(A version of this story appeared on marketwatch.com. See more of Barry's work at econbarry.com)
