File under, zero surprise:
People in the United States are living in a world of pain and they are popping pills more than ever to cope with it.The amount of five major painkillers sold at retail establishments rose 88% between 1997 and 2005, according to an Associated Press analysis of statistics from the Drug Enforcement Administration.
More than 200,000 pounds of codeine, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone and meperidine were purchased at retail stores during the most recent year represented in the data. That total is enough to give more than 300 milligrams of painkillers to every person in the country.
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{ 5 comments }
Is this a matter of selling more pills, or just increasing the prices of meds. The inflation rate of EVERYTHING in pharmacies is truely amazing. These medications have been around for many, many years-they should cost less, not more.
Jeff Rosenberg
Somebody else is consuming my share!
I doubt it. I don’t know any doc’s who regularly prescribe pain meds. It seems to me they would rather leave you suffering than take care of real pain, so just who is writing for all these narcotics anyway? I agree that it is probably from an increase in price more so than anything else.
No it is real. Pill mill clinics around here are cranking out prescriptions like crazy. What is really aggravating is that some of these folks present to ER’s for detox, get detoxed at taxpayer expense, and the prescribing doctor is never informed that they were identified as an abuser–so there is no barrier to them going right back and getting back on the “Holy Trinity” of xanax, soma, and methadone. When they do go back, and come in for detox again, do you think the detoxing doc reports the prescribing doc to the medical board? Not on your life.
The medical profession is dying from the synergism of greed and cowardice.
oh PLUEEZE! first the JACHO pundits require every ed to fill in the smiley face for pain as a vital sign and then they wonder why it is addressed/abused/overused. If I am required to address pain as a separate vital sign by the regulators guess what I’m going to use.. PAIN MEDS!!! What a concept, bad regulation results in bad medicine.
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