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Tuesday, July 01, 2014

Why All the Red-State Pill Popping?

Opioid painkiller abuse is a serious problem in this country. High profile cases include actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died of a heroin overdose earlier this year after getting hooked on prescription painkillers, and Rush Limbaugh, whose hearing loss may have been caused by oxycontin abuse.

A study of prescription rates across the country is interesting: doctors in Minnesota (where I live) issue fewer than half as many prescriptions for opioids than Alabama:
[T]he rates were much higher in some southern states. In Alabama, which led the country, there were 143 painkiller prescriptions for every 100 people in 2012. There were 11 other states where each adult, on average, got a least one painkiller prescription that year, including Tennessee, West Virginia and Kentucky.

CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden told reporters that officials don't think the high rates of prescribing in some states are because people living there have more pain. "This is an epidemic that was largely caused by improper prescribing practices," he said during a media briefing.
These excessively high prescription rates contribute directly to higher death rates by overdose in those states. Florida changed their regulations to combat an epidemic of oxycodone overdoses with great success:
Between 2010 and 2012, annual overdose deaths in Florida dropped 16.7 percent, from 3,201 to 2,666. And deaths from oxycodone, the generic name of the ingredient in many brand-name opioid painkillers, fell by more than half, according to an analysis published in MMWR.
Why are the conservative states so ready to pop addictive painkillers? There's some research that finds conservatives to be driven more by fear, something that seems to be borne out by the attitudes so many conservatives espouse when they insist they have to carry guns everywhere they go. Does all that fear also make conservatives more afraid of pain?

Are southern doctors letting drug companies use them to bilk insurance and Medicaid out of billions of dollars to hook patients on addictive drugs? Are patients just getting prescriptions so they can turn around and sell the pills on the black market?

I don't know. All I can say for sure is that if the numbers were reversed, conservatives would be telling us how liberals are wimpy nancy-boys, how blue-state welfare policies encourage prescription drug abuse and Obamacare is leading to moral decline by giving them heroin-light instead of making them tough it out.

What I do know from personal experience is that these drugs are extremely dangerous. Some years ago I contracted pneumonia, though I didn't know it because I had no problems breathing: the main symptom was an incredibly bad headache that prevented me from sleeping.

When they finally prescribed the right antibiotic, they also gave me a prescription for Percocet (oxycodone and acetaminophen) so that I could sleep. I took one tablet. But as soon as I would start to fall asleep I would stop breathing. I had to force myself to stay awake and breathe until the drug wore off.

I cannot understand why people put this crap into their systems just for the hell of it...

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