|  | | www.stopdrugdeath.com | | Prescription Drug Abuse is Killing Our Children |
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| |  | | The mission of www.stopdrugdeath.com is to cast light on the severity of the epidemic of deaths due to prescription opioid and heroin overdose, to promote understanding of its causes, to increase public awareness of the scope of the problem, by promoting government and private efforts aimed toward prevention, detection, and treatment of prescription drug abuse and dependency, by supporting law enforcement efforts aimed at interdiction, and by providing suggestions for coordination of these efforts.
History of the Epidemic
Through most of the mid-20th century, physicians were taught that prescription opioids were of great value for treatment of acute pain, but that extended treatment of chronic pain was highly likely to lead to addiction. Laws were passed in many states restricting prescription of prescription opioids for chronic non-cancer pain.
Beginning in the late 1980s and 1990s, the view of the treatment of chronic non-cancer pain with opioids began to change. In 1985, the pharmacologist John Morgan coined the term "opiophobia" to describe irrational under-utilization of prescription opioids for seriously ill patients.
In the late 1990s, state medical boards removed existing restrictions on prescribing opioids for chronic non-cancer pain.
In 2000, the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations introudeced new pain management standards; pain had become the "fifth vital sign."
In 1997, Oxycontin was released into the market and an aggressive marketing campaign began. Over the next x years, opioid prescriptions increased by y percent.
Since 1999, 250,000 Americans have died of prescription opioid and heroin overdoses.
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimated that in 2010, at least 37,485 people nationwide died from prescription drug overdoses.
For the first time in our history, prescription drug overdoses have supplanted traffic accidents as the number one accidental cause of death in the United States.
The CDC has called this an epidemic.
The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) released a report in 2007 titled "Wasting the Best and Brightest: Substance Abuse at America's Colleges and Universities."
The White House issued its 2011 Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention Plan, titled “Epidemic: Responding to America’s Prescription Drug Crisis,” to be managed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Yet deaths from prescription drug overdose continue to rise.
It is up to us to do something about this scourge.
This web site is devoted to this purpose. However, the web site is in its infancy, and our goal at this point is to gather information that will be of use in future planning.
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