Opioid Risk Factors

The United States of America has had a war against drugs since the 37th president, Richard Nixon, declared more crimination on drug abuse in June 1971. From mid-1990s to today, a crisis challenges the health department and government on opioid regulation, as millions of Americans die due overdoses of painkillers. Opioids are substances used as painkillers, and they range from prescription medications to the illegal drug, heroin. Abusing these substances can cause a dependency or addiction, which can lead to overdoses, physical damages, emotional trauma, and death. To ease the crisis, physicians are asked to depend on alternatives to pain management. Law enforcement cracks down on profiting drug-dealers and heroin abusers. People are warned against misusing opioids. The controversy begins for those who suffer from chronic pain, because they depend on opioids. There’s so a correlation to the 1980s cocaine epidemic, and people are upset over racial discrimination. Nonetheless, the best way to avoid this crisis is to recover the people at risk, reduce inappropriate opioid description, and have a proper response.

Philips Alcabes article” Medication Nation”, explores the personal and cultural problems that citizens of the United States face with opioid addiction. Alcabes uses modern research and cultural influences to make the article timely and important to today. Alcabes writes:

They are often people who were issued pain medication by a doctor, which resulted in dependence on the drug. According to results from the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), an estimated 2.4 million Americans used prescription drugs non-medically for the first time within the past year, which averages to approximately 6,600 initiates per day. This population would seek help if not for the fear and shame they feel about being labeled as a drug addict. These stigmas perpetuated by people believing that addiction is a character flaw or a sign of weakness can create such fear in a person that they won’t ever reach out for the help they need. They worry about losing their jobs and family, so they opt to go without treatment despite the consequences to their health, which could eventually lead to death. In the “Addiction” article published by the Gale group, it states that “According to the CDC, in 2013 more than sixteen thousand people died from prescription opioids, an increase of 50 percent in three years.” Addiction does not discriminate; it makes no distinction between a person’s age, sex, color, or financial circumstance. However, the stigma surrounding addiction and drug use leaves many Americans unwilling to help fund better treatment.

Opioids and opioid addiction obviously effect those who find themselves abusing such drugs both legally and illegally. Arguably one of the worst effects of opioids is the destruction of the family unit. One thing that holds true is, no matter what type of family structure one lives in, every person in the family (both immediate and sometimes extended) is effected by the trauma of a family members abuse. Abuse can diminish a family’s financial, physical, and mental well-being.4 Any family of an opioid abuser is traumatized; however lower class families suffer the most. The financial instability and often nontraditional unit structure of lower class families renders them venerable to the negative constructs of opioid addiction.

Now because heroin is illegal, this can lead heroin addicts to look for cheap and legal alternatives, called opioids. Opioids can be easily obtained by going to the doctor’s office and be given a doctor’s note stating you need the medicine to relieve the pain. In the Opioid crisis we see many white americans struggle with either heroin or opioids and many wonder why it tends to be more known in the suburban communities rather than the stereotypical urban communities. Some conclude that it was actually due to the distribution of drugs in the urban communities to few members of the suburban community. Others have theorized that white americans are creating the drugs themselves and yet playing along with the stereotype of blacks or mexicans

Not only is the number of deaths attributed to opioid abuse staggering, the stigmas associated with opioid addiction are also concerning. Opioid addiction does not discriminate. White, black, young, old, male, female, or social-economic class – the opioid crisis is affecting our neighbors, friends, and family in large numbers.

This article is about the cost of prescription opioid being abused, dependent on and being misused by individuals in the United States. The authors believed that the cost of prescription opioid abuse has become a burden for the United States as a society. Furthermore, the authors believe that the realms of health care, criminal justice and lost workplace productivity are faced with the most challenges of the burden caused by opioid abuse (Birnbaum, White, Schiller, Waldman, Cleveland, & Roland, 2011). The authors assumed to lessen the economic burden of prescription opioid abuse, there is a continuous need of effort from academic researchers, industry, health care providers, and government to implement appropriate actions (Birnbaum, White et

After two decades, opioid uses have skyrocketed and is now labeled an opioid crisis. Recently, President Donald Trump declared it a national emergency. While United States have declared national emergencies before concerning H1N1 flu and Zika virus, the opioid crisis will have unique challenges. The current system is not equipped to handle the complexities presented by the opioid crisis. West Virginia State Health Officer Dr. Rahul Gupta said that opioid crisis is the worst health crisis to deal with since it “affects nearly every aspect of the social fabric: individuals struggle with addiction, grandparents have to raise children displaced by addiction, and courts are slammed with drug-related cases” (Meehan & Payne, 2017). Opioid use is a

Opioid use disorder, most often touted as opioid abuse, tolerance and addiction are all manifestations of this chronic relapsing disease that can be developed when an individual is repeatedly exposed to illicit drugs. Opioid addiction and overdose is a global issue that is rapidly sweeping across our nation. There is irrefutable evidence suggesting that we are in an opioid addiction epidemic. Over a ten-year time-span, drug overdose has become the leading cause of accidental death in the United States. (American Society of Addiction Medicine, 2016) Rhode Island, the smallest state in the nation with a population of a little over one million, has been the hardest hit. It is claiming lives, destroying families and threatening the quality of

The United States is currently under an opioid epidemic where the abuse of opioids has increased significantly within the last 20 years. It is important to understand that relapse for opioid users is common. This problem has been around for a while; studies have shown that “higher recidivism proportions were found for shorter tenure clients” (Joe, Lloyd, Simpson, & Singh, 1982). Specifically, from 2002-2007 “nonmedical use of prescription pain relievers grew from 11.0 million to 12.5 million people in the United States” (Meyer, Patel, Rattana, Quock, & Mody, 2014). This trend shows that opioid abuse is a growing issue and it requires direct action. Research has disclosed that in 2011, 2.2 million Americans were in jail/prison, and “[o]f those

The United States currently faces an unprecedented epidemic of opioid addiction. This includes painkillers, heroin, and other drugs made from the same base chemical. In the couple of years, approximately one out of twenty Americans reported misuse or abuse of prescriptions painkillers. Heroin abuse and overdoses are on the rise and are the leading cause of injury deaths, surpassing car accidents and gun shots. The current problem differs from the opioid addiction outbreaks of the past in that it is also predominant in the middle and affluent classes. Ultimately, anyone can be fighting a battle with addiction and it is important for family members and loved ones to know the signs. The cause for this epidemic is that the current spike of opioid abuse can be traced to two decades of increased prescription rates for painkillers by well-meaning physicians.

In 2015 the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) conducted a survey interview to estimate the frequency of prescription opioid use, misuse, and use disorders and motivations for misuse among U.S. adults. There were 51,200 eligible adults who completed the survey interview. The NSDUH found that the most commonly reported motivation for misuse was to relieve physical pain (63.4%). Misuse and use disorders were most commonly reported in adults who were uninsured, were unemployed, had low income, or had

Opiate depen¬dence has the highest propensity for causing physical harm to the user, and societal harm through damage to family and social circles. Opiate dependence is not only associated with high mortality rates and poor health among dependent individuals, but also imposes excessively large economic and social costs upon the community including the costs of health care, social care, and crime. Considerable medical, legal, and interpersonal harm, including mortality, is associated with opiate use (Nutt et al., 2007).

To begin, opioid abuse and addiction have increased in frequency in the United States over the past 20 years.4 In 2009, an estimated 5.3 million persons used opioid medications nonmedically within the past month, 200000 used heroin, and approximately 9.6% of African Americans used an illicit drug.4 Racial and ethnic minorities experience disparities in availability and access to mental health care, including substance use disorders.4,7 Primary care practitioners are often called upon to differentiate between appropriate, medically indicated opioid use in pain management vs inappropriate abuse or addiction.4 Racial and ethnic minority populations tend to favor primary care treatment settings over specialty mental health settings.5,6 Recent therapeutic advances allow patients requiring specialized treatment for opioid abuse and addiction to be managed in primary care settings.4 The Drug Addiction Treatment Act of 2000 enables qualified physicians with readily available short-term training to treat opioid-dependent patients with buprenorphine in an office-based setting, potentially making primary care physicians active partners in the diagnosis and treatment of opioid use disorders.4,11

While many people may assume that drug overdose is more prevalent in urban areas than in rural areas, the reality is reversed. Over the last ten years, rural areas surpassed urban areas in drug-overdose occurrences. Opioid use and the use of other drugs has increased dramatically nationwide, but as of 2017, rural areas have a drug overdose death rate of 17 per 100,000 people while the urban statistic is 16.2 per 1,000 people (which is 0.8 less deaths per 100,000 people). The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) proposed four hypotheses to explain this disparity. They are as follows: greater social and kinship connections; peer influence and lack of education concerning drug properties; easier access to prescription drugs combined with less access to treatment centers; and overall economic instability (Keyes). All of these conjectures have adequate support, however one is the most plausible. Drug-overdose related deaths are more prevalent in rural areas than in urban areas because of the overall economic instability.