Matthew T. Mangino
GateHouse Media
April 28, 2017
The opioid crisis has moved from local misfortune to
national calamity. Every day something new pops up that shocks the senses. This
week, the Washington Post wrote about a new drug making the rounds. The new
drug is Carfetanil, a substance used to tranquilize elephants. Carfetanil is
100 times more potent than Fentanyl, the powerful synthetic opioid that killed
Prince.
In recent weeks, police departments across the country
announced Carfentanil-related fatalities, including Maryland, Illinois, Ohio,
Colorado, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Are addicts afraid? Not likely. Last year this post appeared
on the online discussion website, Reddit, “(h)ad my first Overdose yesterday,
and it took 15 minutes of cpr and 35 minutes of manual breathing after the
initial dose of narcan ... Okay so my question ... If i got narcan’d at 430pm
central yesterday, when could i use dope without wasting it?”
Narcan, also known as Naloxone, is a drug that can counter
an overdose. Many first responders and police officers carry Narcan to revive
naive and uninformed drugs users who were duped into overdosing. Not so fast,
last fall the Pennsylvania State police investigated an alleged drug overdose
of a Johnstown police officer who was on duty and inside the Public Safety
Building at the time, reported the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat.
Opioids are normally prescribed synthetic medicines that
produce a morphine-like effect. They are most often use in painkillers such as
Percocet, Fentanyl, Oxycodone and OxyContin.
No place has experienced the suffering of opioid addiction
more than West Virginia. The Charleston Gazette-Mail analyzed shipment data
from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and found that 423 million opioid
painkillers were delivered to West Virginia between 2007 and 2012. During that
time, almost 2,000 people died from opioid overdoses.
In Kermit, West Virginia, population 392, drug companies shipped
nearly 9 million opioid pills over 2 years to a single pharmacy.
Hamilton County, Ohio, which includes Cincinnati and nearly
50 law enforcement agencies, experienced an average of 50 to 70 reported
overdoses a week in early 2016. One month after law enforcement learned
Carfentanil had hit the county, overdoses skyrocketed to about 175 to 200 calls
a week, reported The Post.
Drug overdoses already kill more Americans than car crashes
and homicides, and the problem may be worse than it appears. Dr. Victoria Hall
recently told CNN, “It’s quite concerning, because it means that the (opioid)
epidemic, which is already quite severe, could potentially be even worse.”
More important, there’s no “national standardization for how
to fill out a death certificate,” Hall told CNN, so when there’s a profound
infectious disease, such as pneumonia, that’s the only thing noted. Hall fears
as many as 50 percent of opioid overdoses go unreported.
The Donald Trump administration has called for spending $500
million more on opioid addiction in his proposed budget for the fiscal year
beginning in October.
Democrats are not convinced of the administration’s
commitment to the issue, noting that the health care legislation supported by
Trump this year would have eliminated a requirement that Medicaid cover mental
health and substance abuse.
Neither money nor politics will solve this problem. There
comes a point when the destruction caused by a medicine outweighs the benefit.
Imagine if there was an FDA approved drug that helped half the people who took
it and killed the other half.
Would the FDA, the Congress, the public tolerate such odds?
No, it is time to take opioids off the market.
-- Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett,
Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by
McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him
on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.
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