Taking the Fun Out of Popping Pain Pills
By NATASHA SINGER
NYT
HOW can you get a faster high from sustained-release pain pills like OxyContin? Let me count some of the ways.
People have crushed them using bookends, hammers, mortars and pestles, and then snorted the powder, according to doctors who study addiction. They’ve chewed and swallowed fistfuls of pills. They’ve minced the pills in blenders, pulverized them in coffee grinders, dissolved them in water and then injected the liquid.
Even for those of us who don’t inhale, the misuse and abuse of prescription painkillers called opioids should matter because, putting moral and ethics aside for the moment, it’s costing us billions of dollars.
In a 2008 federal survey, an estimated 4.7 million Americans were found to have used prescription pain relievers for nonmedical reasons in the previous month. The abuse of opioids now costs at least $11 billion annually in excess medical care including overdoses by adults and accidental ingestion by children, said Howard G. Birnbaum, a health economist with the Analysis Group in Boston.
(Continued here.)
NYT
HOW can you get a faster high from sustained-release pain pills like OxyContin? Let me count some of the ways.
People have crushed them using bookends, hammers, mortars and pestles, and then snorted the powder, according to doctors who study addiction. They’ve chewed and swallowed fistfuls of pills. They’ve minced the pills in blenders, pulverized them in coffee grinders, dissolved them in water and then injected the liquid.
Even for those of us who don’t inhale, the misuse and abuse of prescription painkillers called opioids should matter because, putting moral and ethics aside for the moment, it’s costing us billions of dollars.
In a 2008 federal survey, an estimated 4.7 million Americans were found to have used prescription pain relievers for nonmedical reasons in the previous month. The abuse of opioids now costs at least $11 billion annually in excess medical care including overdoses by adults and accidental ingestion by children, said Howard G. Birnbaum, a health economist with the Analysis Group in Boston.
(Continued here.)
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