The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said not only do they run a high risk of addicting the user, but they can actually make patients' chronic pain worse.
Public awareness of the opioid crisis has grown in the past few weeks, after the sudden death of pop star Prince, who died in April after reportedly seeking treatment for painkiller addiction, as well as with recent legislation passed by the U.S. House on opioid abuse.
“More than 40 Americans die each day from prescription opioid overdoses,” Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a statement earlier this month. “Overprescribing opioids -- largely for chronic pain -- is a key driver of America’s drug-overdose epidemic."
A single opioid overdose can also kill, because it can result in respiratory distress. The number of those deaths has been rising to a high of 29,000 in 2014 -- the latest year for which the figures are available.
Of that number, 18,893 deaths were from prescription painkillers. The other 10,574 were from heroin, the opioid of choice when painkillers get too expensive or to difficult to obtain.
In a study in the New England Journal of Medicine in April, Frieden and fellow researcher Debra Houry were blunt: "We know of no other medication routinely used for a nonfatal condition that kills patients so frequently."
Vicodin, Oxycontin and their cousins, all synthetic versions of the
narcotic found in the poppy flower, hit the market in an aggressive
marketing rollout in the mid-1990s.They quickly became popular, providing a euphoric effect while they dulled pain. Studies at the time promised the drugs carried little risk of addiction.
Pain management
The introduction of the new drugs dovetailed with directives by medical experts for health care providers to focus more on pain management.
Doctors began asking their patients to estimate their pain level on a scale of 1 to 10, giving patients more power over what drugs they were prescribed. It wasn't long before the drugs were getting used recreationally.
Thirty-five year-old Nina, now clean, sober, and a successful caterer in Washington, D.C., was a recreational drug user in the 1990s.
"People weren't tracking it like they are today," she said. "So I would 'lose' my prescription or it would 'fall down the sink' or I'd 'leave it behind at Grandma's.' "
Nina said it wasn't euphoria she was trying to achieve with her drug use; it was numbness that she wanted, because her mind was never quiet.
Lou, a 60-year-old travel coordinator, also from Washington, D.C., worked as a pharmaceutical representative in the 1990s, a job that gave her access to drug samples in doctors' medicine cabinets.
"I'd just take them," she said, smuggling home the controlled substances.
She liked to experiment. The results were unpredictable. More than once, she went too far.
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