WP: As opioid overdoses rise, police officers become counselors, doctors and social workers

[China]

In mild pain after doctor or dentist visit in Oregon? Don't expect opioids anymore

 

The Oregon Health Authority has released new guidelines for prescribing opioids to patients with short-term acute pain. The guidelines include advising doctors not to consider opioids for mild to moderate pain in patients who haven't had past exposure to opioids. Doctors should also check on the patient's history of substance abuse problems, educate them about safe storage and disposal and prescribe the lowest effective dose.

 

Click on the link for more

[China]

Veterinarians Report That Some People Are Abusing Their Pets to Get Opioids

 

Drug Enforcement Administration officials are alerting doctors to a fairly new and potentially widespread development in the opioid crisis: In the hunt for drugs, some people are abusing their own pets to obtain narcotics from veterinarians, according to a new report by the Courier Journal in Louisville, KY.

 

In Kentucky, one woman used disposable razor blades to cut her dog, named Alice, several different times, in hopes of getting her hands on an opioid pain killer. "I remember my initial feeling of disbelief, this can't be real," Elizabethtown Police Officer John Thomas, who investigated the case, told the Courier Journal. "It was shocking."

 

Thomas added that Heather Pereira, Alice's owner, brought her dog to an animal clinic, first in Louisville and then to an animal hospital in nearby Elizabethtown, to get Tramadol, a prescription pain pill.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Renegade7]

Another example of what we're capable of in back to back posts.

[visionary]

 

[China]

A generation of African American heroin users is dying in the opioid epidemic nobody talks about. The nation’s capital is ground zero.

 

Spoon, whose product could be trusted, wasn’t answering his phone. So just after 9 a.m. on a fetid August morning, Sam Rogers had trekked to a corner two miles east of the U.S. Capitol on Pennsylvania Avenue, hoping to find heroin that wouldn’t kill him. 

 

Now Rogers, 53, was back in his bedroom at the hot, dark house on R Street SE. Sitting in a worn swivel chair, he cued a Rob Thomas song on his cellphone and bent over his cooker and syringe. The heroin — a tan powder sold for $10 a bag — simmered into a cloudy liquid with the amber hue of ginger ale.

 

Palliative or poison: He would know soon enough.

 

“Come on,” Rogers murmured, sliding a needle into his outer forearm between knots of scar tissue. A pink plume of blood rose in the barrel of the syringe. “There you go.”

 

In the halls of Congress, a short bus ride away, medical professionals and bereaved families have warned for years of the damage caused by opioids to America’s predominantly white small towns and suburbs. 

 

Almost entirely omitted from their message has been one of the drug epidemic’s deadliest subplots: The experience of older African Americans like Rogers, for whom habits honed over decades of addiction are no longer safe.

 

Heroin laced with the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl has killed thousands of such drug users in the past several years, driving a largely overlooked urban public-health crisis. Since 2014, the national rate of fatal drug overdoses has increased more than twice as fast among African Americans as among whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

In this new explosion of deaths, the nation’s capital is ground zero. The District saw 279 people die of opioid overdoses last year, a figure that surpassed the city’s homicides and was greater than three times the number of opioid deaths in 2014. More than 70 percent of cases involved fentanyl or its analogues, according to the District’s chief medical examiner, and more than 80 percent of victims were black. 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[visionary]

 

[Bang]

Do that on the corner and you're a drug dealing scumbag who should be in jail.

 

Our pharma companies are no different than any other heroin pusher.

 

A wall will stop this.

 

~Bang

[Riggo-toni]

Well, at least it's not a public health crisis like pornography...

[visionary]

 

[visionary]

 

 

 

 

 

[China]

How High-Pressure Insys Prescription Call Center Lied to Insurers to Sell Opioids

 

The goal for Insys Therapeutics Inc.’s call center in Phoenix was simple: persuade insurers to authorize at least 70 prescriptions a week of its expensive opioid spray.

 

Workers would get bonuses for surpassing the goals, a former call center manager testified. Even if the patient had minor skin cancer decades earlier, employees were told to lie to insurers to get approval for the powerful and expensive drug, which had only been approved for “breakthrough” cancer pain, Elizabeth Gurrieri told a Boston jury.

 

“So almost every call from the Insys reimbursement center included lies and misrepresentations?” Assistant U.S. Attorney David Lazarus asked Gurrieri.

 

“Most of them, yes,” she replied.

 

Gurrieri took the witness stand Friday in the trial of Insys’s founder John Kapoor and four other former executives. As the trial enters its fifth week, Gurrieri is helping prosecutors paint of portrait of a pharmaceutical company that cared only about its bottom line. After witnesses described unethical and high-pressure sales practices, prosecutors have begun showing how the company routinely lied to insurers who would pick up the tab for the drug Subsys.

The pressure came from the top, Gurrieri told the jury Monday.

 

Kapoor “yelled a lot” on weekly sales calls, she said. “He was angry a lot, very demanding.”

 

The jury heard recordings of Insys call center employees repeatedly claiming to insurers that patients needed Subsys because they suffered from severe cancer pain, even though they weren’t actually diagnosed with cancer.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[LD0506]

[LD0506]

Quote

England’s National Portrait Gallery Refuses Million-Dollar Sackler Donation, the First Major Art Institution to Do So Due to Opioid Crisis

 

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/london-national-portrait-gallery-refuses-million-dollar-sackler-donation.html?fbclid=IwAR0Gvmj7pB7wgvn6wWzqMb_B0HH8pBKpO6BKLj5ckS5neO46VyiuMXSpRSM

[visionary]

 

[visionary]

 

[China]

For First Time, Pharmaceutical Distributor Faces Federal Criminal Charges Over Opioid Crisis

 

The charges against the wholesaler, Rochester Drug Cooperative, and two of its former executives marked a new tactic for prosecutors in tackling the epidemic of addiction to prescription painkillers.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[visionary]

 

[Bang]

The worst criminals in our country are immune to prosecution.

Purdue paid what amounts to throwaway money that was likely set aside just for heading off lawsuits.

 

If you are an American, you are a mark, and nothing else. Pay up, sucker. Become an addict if you can't handle it. Or, if you say .. sprain an ankle and go to the doctor.

 

Every single industry we MUST trust..  cannot be trusted, and in fact, is a predator. Every. Single. One.

 

There is no fixing it. My retirement will not be in this country.

 

~Bang

[Riggo-toni]

STAMFORD, Conn. — An 800-pound, nearly 11-foot-long steel sculpture of a bent and burned drug spoon was placed Friday in front of the Connecticut headquarters of drugmaker Purdue Pharma as part of an art protest against the opioid crisis.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/727997002

 

[China]

U.S. drug overdose deaths are falling. That's not the case in Tennessee

 

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — You may have seen the headline that drug overdose deaths in the U.S. fell in 2018 , the first such drop in decades. While that is the case nationwide, a look at data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that's not the case in Tennessee.

 

Predicted overdose deaths rose to 1,939 in the state in 2018, up 4.8% from 2017. That includes 1,837 confirmed deaths. The rest remain currently unconfirmed by toxicology tests.

Kentucky not only saw a decline, but a larger drop than nationwide numbers. Predicted overdose deaths fell 15.1% in 2018, down to 1,573. (1,336 were confirmed) The nationwide rate fell 5.1%

 

The CDC numbers don't reveal which drugs are responsible for the number of overdose deaths on the state level.

 

Nationwide, the majority of overdose deaths involved opioids including oxycodone, hydrocodone and morphine. But nearly half involved synthetic opioids, including fentanyl and tramadol.

[Destino]

On 5/8/2019 at 8:07 AM, Bang said:

The worst criminals in our country are immune to prosecution.

Purdue paid what amounts to throwaway money that was likely set aside just for heading off lawsuits.

 

If you are an American, you are a mark, and nothing else. Pay up, sucker. Become an addict if you can't handle it. Or, if you say .. sprain an ankle and go to the doctor.

 

Every single industry we MUST trust..  cannot be trusted, and in fact, is a predator. Every. Single. One.

 

There is no fixing it. My retirement will not be in this country.

 

~Bang

Because you can’t send companies to prison, and we insist on punishing companies and not the actual human beings employed there making the decisions that hurt people.  

 

[tshile]

5 hours ago, Destino said:

Because you can’t send companies to prison, and we insist on punishing companies and not the actual human beings employed there making the decisions that hurt people.  

 

 

Start throwing execs in jail. 

Bet things change at least a little

[Larry]

6 hours ago, Destino said:

Because you can’t send companies to prison, and we insist on punishing companies and not the actual human beings employed there making the decisions that hurt people.  

 

 

Next you're going to say that taking away scholarships from a college football program, while the head coach signs a huge contract with a different team, isn't an effective deterrent. 

[TradeTheBeal!]

About 10 years ago, I hired a young guy straight outta Hampden-Sydney...Lax player.  Smart, funny, hard worker...sold a ton of cars for about 6 months.  Then he started showing the classic signs of addiction.  Turns out he had gotten a taste for oxy after hurting his back in college.  I fired him and rehired three separate times while he battled and relapsed.  We finally agreed to part ways around 2016.

 

Just found out he passed this weekend.  33 years old.

 

Brutal.

[Springfield]

Yeah that’s a sad story that I’ve heard too much.  

 

The post is running a great series of stories about the opioid crisis lately.  Last week they posted numbers about opioid prescriptions and deaths, the maps were similar.  They have numbers of basically every pharmacy across the country.  It’s staggering exactly how much opioids have been prescribed.

 

Think this is it:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/dea-pain-pill-database/?utm_term=.ac73c95ceb66

 

A CVS in Falls Church averaged something like 200 prescriptions PER DAY.  That’s one pharmacy in one of the lowest per capita distribution counties in the nation.