Prescription Painkiller Deaths on the Rise

Anthony Gucciardi
NaturalSociety
August 24, 2011

The number of deaths associated with prescription painkillers known as opioids are on the rise, according to the British Medical Journal. Opioids, unknown to most consumers, contain compounds derived from the opium poppy.

ScienceDaily reports:

While they have long been used to control the symptoms of cancer and acute medical conditions, they are increasingly being used to control chronic pain, for example in patients suffering from osteoarthritis, say Dr Irfan Dhalla and colleagues at the University of Toronto.

They describe how in the US, deaths involving opioid painkillers increased from 4,041 in 1999 to 14,459 in 2007 and are now more common than deaths from skin cancer, HIV and alcoholic liver disease. They add that between 1.4 million and 1.9 million Germans are addicted to prescription drugs and that some authorities have suggested that the UK may face a similar epidemic to that of North America in five to ten years time. Indeed, the use of strong opioids for chronic non-cancer pain in the UK has been described as a “disaster in the making” by Dr. Des Spence previously on bmj.com.

Dr. Dhalla and colleagues add that “deaths involving methadone and codeine roughly doubled in England and Wales between 2005 and 2009, while deaths involving heroin or morphine remained unchanged.”

In order to tackle the crisis in the US and Canada, the authors put forward several strategies.

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