Exclusive investigation: Your prescriptions aren’t private

http://www.wcpo.com/longform/so-you-think-prescriptions-are-private

Legislators in 31 states have left your PHI (Private Health Information) as described by HIPAA … OPEN for law enforcement to rummage thru at their discretion and come to conclusion of your legal/illegal prescription records and take actions on their OPINION on YOUR FACTS.

The prescriptions you have in your medicine cabinet might not be as private as you believe they are. Thirty-one states grant law enforcement warrantless access to databases containing drug histories, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is pushing hard to search records even in states that have privacy safeguards.

The disclosures to police agencies often take place without notifying the person targeted in a search and without offering a chance to object. That means no court ever approves the release of records that can reveal treatment for private medical conditions such as cancer, psychiatric disorders, HIV or gender reassignment. 

Prescription drug monitoring programs are operated by every state except Missouri and the District of Columbia. Missouri’s program awaits state legislative approval, and D.C. expects to have its program fully operational by the end of the year. The primary goal of the state programs is to track and analyze prescription data to help doctors and pharmacists curb the overuse of addictive drugs such as painkillers. But a patchwork of state laws has left the privacy of Americans largely unguarded, allowing police agencies easy access.

Scripps News found during a five-month investigation that law enforcement tapped into at least 344,921 prescription histories of Americans between 2014-2015 in the states that don’t require a warrant or another form of court authorization. That is more than six times the number of searches that took place by law enforcement in states that have more privacy safeguards enacted. It is access without oversight that leaves the door open for abuses.

 

Their lives were almost ruined

“I could have lost my family, I could have lost my career,” said Marlon Jones, an assistant fire chief with the Unified Fire Authority of Salt Lake County, Utah. Jones says he was falsely charged with felonies related to doctor shopping as a result of a warrantless search by local police in Cottonwood Heights.

Investigators were looking into the theft of prescription drugs from area ambulances. With no suspects, no probable cause and no warrant, a police officer working the case logged into Utah’s controlled substance database and searched the prescription drug records for all 480 fire department employees.

“I had no idea that a police officer, just on a whim, could go into my medical records and then determine what’s appropriate, in his opinion,” recounted Ryan Pyle, a fellow firefighter paramedic whose prescription records got swept up in the same warrantless search.

Police never made an arrest in the drug thefts but instead zeroed in on the prescription histories of Jones and Pyle and charged them with acquiring controlled substances under false pretenses. The charges had nothing to do with the crime police were initially investigating.  

“It impacted every bit of our lives,” said Jones, who was placed on suspension just months after having been promoted. “What (the investigator) did threatened to take everything I held dear.”

Pyle’s arrest came as he and his wife were in the middle of adopting two boys. “When I was initially charged, that’s the first thing I thought of: We’re going to lose these kids,” he said. 

Kelvyn Cullimore Jr., the mayor of Cottonwood Heights, said police followed proper protocol and used the tools they had available. 

“We would not do anything that would go beyond the bounds of what the law allows,” he said. “We were acting purely according to the way the state law permitted.”

In hindsight, Cullimore said, police could have conducted a more narrowly tailored search, but he said sees no problem with warrantless searches if state laws allows them.

[Video: Mayor Kelvyn Cullimore defends doing what the law allows]

Prosecutors eventually dropped the charges but the controversy prompted Utah lawmakers to enact a new law in May 2015 requiring police agencies to obtain a search warrant before they can access the prescription database. 

Last December, a state legislative audit looking back at police use of the database before the new law revealed police overreach might have been more widespread. Auditors reviewed records for four police agencies in Utah and concluded warrantless access “may have resulted in questionable use” of the database by police in more than half the cases sampled.

National battles brewing

Concern about privacy rights and potential abuses of the information stored in Utah’s database date back to when the state launched the program in the mid-90s. In a March 1995 letter to the Speaker of the House and President of the Senate, then Governor Mike Leavitt warned, “I will be watching the use of this database. If the information from the database is used in any manner other than its intended purpose, I will seek to have the database disbanded.”

Two decades later, controversies in Utah have helped shape the state into one of a handful of emerging legal battlegrounds where privacy advocates and law enforcement agencies from across the nation  will be pitted against each other in a fight that could ultimately help determine how private Americans’ prescription records are.

“Permitting law enforcement officers to go on fishing expeditions in people’s personal information, then make their own untrained medical judgments and prosecute people as a result, has the power to destroy lives,” said Scott Michelman, an attorney for the Washington, D.C.-based watchdog Public Citizen.

[Video: Attorney Scott Michelman talks about warrantless searches]

Michelman says warrantless searches of prescription records violate the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which bans unreasonable searches or seizures by police. “With tremendous power comes tremendous responsibility and also tremendous potential for abuse.”

Michelman will represent Pyle and Jones next month when their privacy lawsuit is argued in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. The outcome could ultimately determine whether warrantless searches of prescription records will be considered legal or banned outright in six Western states.

               

DEA pushes hard for access

While privacy advocates have won important recent victories, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has grown increasingly aggressive, pushing to circumvent privacy safeguards even when state legislatures put them in place. 

In Oregon, privacy-focused lawmakers set up the state’s database in 2009 and required law enforcement to present a warrant in order to access prescription records in the state’s database.   But despite the state’s law, the DEA claimed a separate federal law still allowed them warrantless access to Oregon’s data.  The DEA wanted access using only an administrative subpoena —  a document that does not require approval by a court.  Alarmed, the State of Oregon sued to block the DEA’s attempts and the American Civil Liberties Union intervened in the lawsuit. 

The court ruled in favor of Oregon and the ACLU, with the federal judge Ancer Haggerty concluding “the DEA’s use of administrative subpoenas to obtain prescription records from the (prescription drug monitoring program) violates the Fourth Amendment.”

The DEA has since appealed the ruling and the case is expected be heard this fall.  But a legal defeat in Oregon did not stop the DEA from trying again elsewhere.  In June, the DEA sued the State of Utah in an attempt to force that state to still comply with the DEA’s administrative subpoenas, despite Utah’s warrant requirements that were put in place by the legislature in the wake of the controversy involving the firefighters. The ACLU filed a motion in July to intervene in that case as well, warning that the federal government’s latest actions constituted a broad intrusion on the will of state lawmakers.

“Utah’s law was passed with overwhelming support by Utah legislators and the general public, who clearly appreciate the need to protect the privacy of all Utahns from warrantless government searches,” said John Mejia, legal director for the ACLU of Utah.

The DEA declined an interview, but in an email spokesperson Barbara Carreno wrote, “it’s up to each state how to manage law enforcement access to its (prescription drug monitoring programs), including our access. Access is determined by the state legislature; we have no influence over a state’s legislative process, nor do we attempt to have influence.” 

The statement continued, “we have no position on the question of whether there should be a national standard” for law enforcement access to prescription drug monitoring programs.

The agency has not responded to follow up questions. 

Vast differences in state privacy safeguards

Seventy-eight Americans die every day from opioid overdose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the White House said that when “properly implemented” the state’s prescription monitoring programs are a key part of the push to curb opioid abuse, but it declined to address whether there should be a national policy to guide states on what privacy safeguards should be implemented.

“Each state develops laws or guidelines to ensure the information in those systems is used effectively and appropriately,” said Mario Moreno, spokesperson for the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy.  

 

Of the 31 states that allow warrantless access, 15 confirmed to Scripps they give law enforcement direct or login access to the sensitive information contained in the prescription drug databases. This allows some law enforcement officers to access the database from their computers.

“All registered users have direct logins (usernames and passwords) to be able to make requests. No prior contact to our agency needs to be made,” Indiana authorities said in response to a Scripps inquiry.  “They do not have to provide anything prior to a request, only the case number.”

In West Virginia, police must only promise they have an investigation to tap in.  “No case number or other certification is required,” said Michael Goff, administrator of the controlled substance database for the West Virginia Board of Pharmacy.

“When that type of information can be rifled through …by law enforcement, with the power to prosecute, that’s a very scary thing and something that should give all of us pause,” said attorney Michelman.

Minnesota limits the amount of information police can access to the most recent two years, preventing them from digging through a lifetime of prescription records that might reveal older treatments for depression or other conditions an individual would not want revealed.   New York goes back five years, and Virginia has information compiled dating back to 2003.

Among the states that provided numbers to Scripps, Texas, which doesn’t require law enforcement to present a search warrant first, leads the nation in the number of times police requested access to a state database.  Between 2014 and 2015 law enforcement tapped into the database 57,477 times to review the prescription histories of Texans. That is more than three times the number of requests for access as what took place in California, a state that has both a warrant requirement and a population that is nearly 50 percent larger than Texas.

Alabama, Georgia, Maine and New Jersey declined to provide the number of law enforcement searches of their respective prescription drug monitoring databases.

Thirty-four of the 49 state programs responding to the survey say they have never conducted an audit of their  programs. Twenty-three of the 31 states that allow warrantless access have never audited their prescription monitoring programs. 

Balancing privacy with law enforcement

New Mexico has had one of the highest drug overdose rates in the nation for the past two decades, and officials there say the prescription drug monitoring program is an important tool to help combat the problem.

“We have an opportunity to make certain law enforcement, pharmacists, doctors themselves can accurately obtain the information that would lead them to believe a person is being over-prescribed or that they’re gaming the system,” said Mike Unthank, head of New Mexico’s Regulation and Licensing Department.

Unthank also acknowledges New Mexico officials have largely not wrestled with privacy issues bubbling up in other parts of the country. The state allows warrantless access for police and is among the states that give law enforcement direct log-in access to data. It also has never conducted an audit of its program.

He said he “absolutely, at this point certainly” has faith in police agencies to keep a close watch on any officers entrusted with direct access to the database. 

The Albuquerque Police Department, one such agency, told Scripps it steers clear of the database altogether.

“We have never requested access to that database and don’t see any need to gain access to the database,” Tanner Tixier, a spokesperson for the Albuquerque Police Department, wrote in an email to Scripps.  “We believe it would be a violation of HIPPA.”

Yet, records released to Scripps from the State of New Mexico show at least two individuals from the Albuquerque Police Department have been accessing the database in all three years from 2014 and 2016.  One Albuquerque police officer made 35 requests for patient data in 2015 alone.

Unthank had no explanation for the discrepancy, but he acknowledged it is a sign New Mexico might want to audit its program and begin placing privacy safeguards above the state’s desire to increase utilization of its database.

“I am glad you brought this to my attention,” he said.  “Privacy rights would trump anything. The rights of the citizen, I think, are absolutely critical as a first consideration.”

Unthank, who is a direct appointee of the governor, said he does see the “potential” for privacy intrusions under the current setup of New Mexico’s system.  

“The timing is good to attempt to balance these two. I think you could put both together. The rights of the public being protected and also the utilization by law enforcement,” he said.

It’s this balance that privacy advocates want to ensure is met in every state across the country.

 “We’re not objecting to the collection of the information. It’s the accessing of the information by law enforcement without judicial approval of any kind,” said attorney Michelman.  “This issue is so important because of the depth of the privacy interest at stake.”

Filed under: General Problems | 3 Comments »

Filed under: General Problems | 1 Comment »

Health Insurers’ Pullback Threatens to Create Monopolies

Analysis suggests ACA exchanges are likely to offer just one coverage option in 31% of U.S. counties

http://www.wsj.com/articles/health-insurers-pullback-threatens-to-create-monopolies-1472408338?mod=e2fb

Nearly a third of the nation’s counties look likely to have just a single insurer offering health plans on the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges next year, according to a new analysis, an industry pullback that poses a major challenge to the health law.

The new study, by the Kaiser Family Foundation, suggests there could be just one option for coverage in 31% of counties in 2017, and there may be only two in another 31%. That would give exchange customers in large swaths of the U.S. far less choice than they had this year, when 7% of counties had one insurer and 29% had two.

At least one county—Pinal in Arizona—is at risk of having no insurers offering marketplace plans next year, despite talks between regulators and insurers aimed at filling the void.

The Kaiser study is the most comprehensive look at competition in the ACA marketplaces since several big insurers announced withdrawals from at least some of the exchanges. In many places, the retreats threaten to undermine the premise of the marketplaces, which were supposed to foster competition among insurers, holding down prices and expanding the offerings available to consumers buying their own health plans; the government subsidizes premiums for many of those individuals.

“It is essential for there to be a robust marketplace with multiple competitors offering different products,” said Leemore Dafny, a professor at Harvard Business School. “The whole thing was framed around it.”

Research by Dr. Dafny and others has shown that premiums tend to be lower when there are more insurers competing.

Insurance-industry executives say premiums reflect the cost of enrollees’ care, but in some markets they worry about a cycle of rising prices that might encourage the consumers who need health care least to opt out. Dr. Dafny says federal subsidies will blunt the impact of premium increases for many consumers.

Most of the likely one-insurer counties are predominantly rural, according to the Kaiser analysis, which updates one it did in May, But several urban areas, such as Charlotte, N.C., Philadelphia and Oklahoma City, also face a lack of competition. The analysis suggests that about 19% of current exchange enrollees could have just one option next year, while another 19% would have two.

“It’s terribly concerning,” said Julie Mix McPeak, Tennessee’s commissioner of insurance. “I feel like we don’t have enough choices in the market.” In most of her state, there will likely be just one exchange insurer next year, after the withdrawal of UnitedHealth Group Inc. ; consumers throughout the state had at least two options in 2016.

The number of counties with limited competition is likely to change between now and late September, when insurers have to lock in their plans, and in some states exact insurer footprints aren’t yet available, so the analysis includes estimates. Since Aetna Inc. said earlier this month that it would withdraw from 11 of the 14 state exchanges where it markets plans, other insurers have been reassessing their situation, worried they will get stuck with more of the sickest enrollees.

“All the other carriers say, ‘what does that mean for me?’ ” said Paul Rooney, a vice president at eHealth Inc., a major seller of individual plans.

“A number of steps remain before the full picture of this year’s marketplace competition is known, but the ACA has greatly expanded the insurance options available to consumers in the individual marketplace,” said Marjorie Connolly, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

President Barack Obama has called for the creation of a new public insurance option to bolster competition in areas where it is limited.

States including Alabama, Alaska, Missouri, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee are likely to move next year to having one insurer in all or a majority of counties, Kaiser’s analysis found. Regulators in those states confirmed the findings, except in Florida and Missouri, where officials said they didn’t yet have counts.

In many states, the decline in exchange competition stems largely from the pullbacks of UnitedHealth, Aetna and Humana Inc., which have all said they are seeking to stem growing losses on their ACA business. Some states that lost insurers, like Kansas and North Carolina, were able to attract new ones.

Next year will bring “a major shift in insurer participation,” the biggest decrease since the start of the exchanges in 2014, said Cynthia Cox, an associate director at the Kaiser foundation.

In some markets, the high-profile withdrawals of big companies come atop the retreat of smaller insurers, including the closure of 16 of the 23 nonprofit cooperatives that launched operations under the health law.

UnitedHealth’s planned withdrawal from Oklahoma came after two regional insurers bowed out, according to the state’s regulator. Aetna, meanwhile, canceled plans to join the state’s exchange.

The upshot: Only one remaining exchange insurer statewide. “Let’s face it, there’s no competition,” said Mike Rhoads, Oklahoma’s deputy insurance commissioner.

Joseph Devoy, a 31-year-old construction worker who lives in Arizona’s Pinal County, said he had to switch insurers to UnitedHealth this year after his previous provider, the co-op Meritus, stopped selling plans. Now, with UnitedHealth leaving Arizona, Mr. Devoy, who has to purchase coverage through the ACA marketplace to qualify for a federal subsidy, isn’t sure if any insurer will be offering a plan he can buy for next year. Without coverage, he fears he could face a penalty under the law.

“I don’t know what to do now,” Mr. Devoy said. Even if an insurer does come into Pinal, “at that point, it’s a monopoly.”

Write to Anna Wilde Mathews at anna.mathews@wsj.com and Stephanie Armour at stephanie.armour@wsj.com

Filed under: General Problems | Leave a Comment »

The surgeon general just sent a worrisome letter to every doctor in America

In case you have been living under a rock , the batteries in your hearing aide are dead, both your computer and TV/cable are not working.. The Surgeon General of the US .. just attempted to turn the “opiate guidelines” of the CDC into the “law of the land”.  The impact on the chronic pain community could be substantial.

Let’s talk election… These two people are DEMOCRATS and if Hillary Clinton gets elected.. they will most likely stay in their appointed positions. This Surgeon General will keep “ringing the bell” of reducing opiate/benzo prescribing.  Ignore the facts/discussions about Clinton’s email servers, Benghazi and the Clinton Foundation. Hillary has come out in support of the proposed “soda tax” in Philli and Sen Manchin’s “opiate tax”… those taxes will fall under the same category of Alcohol and Tobacco as “sin taxes”.  Manchin’s tax is suppose to go to treat/help those who are suffering from a “opiate use disorder”… what was previously known as “ADDICTS OR JUNKIES”.

Of  course, this “opiate tax” won’t/can’t be collected from all the opiates/Heroin that is illegally sold on the street. Can’t catch the street suppliers, can’t stop the flow to the street.. so you tax the people who have a legal/legit medical necessity…

Opiate prescribing peaked in 2012 and has been dropping ever since, but the number of people OD’s… continues to increase.. but all the stats that the bureaucrats and the media is using is from 2012 or before for the number of opiate Rxs being written and compare them to current OD deaths… Is this a “apple to oranges” comparison ?

We all know that both AG’s under this administration has done NOTHING to enforce the ADA discrimination when it comes to chronic pain pts.  His first AG (Holder) left office being held in CONTEMPT OF CONGRESS… because according to our system the President is the final authority if/when laws are enforced.

Could this help explain the dramatic change in direction  of the DEA toward prescribers and pts in the war on drugs/pts during the 2010-2012 period.. which is still accelerating ? So if you are a chronic painer .. you need to look at your life 8 yrs ago and your pain management and  ask yourself “Am I doing better or worse than 8 yrs ago”.  This administration is part of the problem… but there is enough blame to be shared by Congress… which – IMO – consists of 535 self-centered, egotistical, narcissists in one very large “sand box” .. called “the establishment”.

Few like either Presidental candidate of the two major parties and everyone seems to ignore the Libertarian Party Candidate… Gary Johnson… soft spoken, two term Governor of New Mexico, in favor of  legalizing MJ/MMJ , wants a smaller government and successfully ran New Mexico while reducing the size of government and creating a surplus for the state. Other countries have multiple political parties running their governments… why have we allowed only two parties to control/dominate the way our Federal government functions ?

http://www.businessinsider.com/letter-surgeon-general-sent-every-doctor-on-opioids-2016-8

America’s doctor just knocked on the doors of every US physician across the country.

Virtually, at least.

On Thursday, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy sent this letter to 2.3 million American doctors asking for their help to curb what’s being called an “unprecedented” epidemic of opioid painkiller overdose deaths.

It’s the first time in history that a surgeon general has sent a letter directly to American physicians.

This is a major signal to doctors and the public that it’s time for something to be done about the thousands of Americans who are dying each year from overdosing on prescription painkillers like oxycodone, fentanyl, and morphine.

Between 2013 and 2014, deaths from synthetic opioids skyrocketed by 79%, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Thursday.

Since opioid painkillers slow breathing and act on the same brain systems as heroin, they carry serious risks of overdose and, in rarer cases, addiction. But cases that would normally be rare are happening with increasing regularity as the drugs are being given to so many people. Despite being home to 5% of the world’s population, America consumes 80% of its opioids.

These drugs are powerful. Fentanyl, the drug that killed Prince, is roughly 50 times stronger than pure heroin. And although the deadly drug is legal with a doctor’s prescription, it’s also being made illegally in underground labs and traded across the US.

Still, doctors’ prescriptions are a sizeable part of the problem.

A 2014 report from the American Academy of Neurology estimates that more than 100,000 Americans have died from prescribed opioids since the late 1990s. Those at highest risk include people between 35 and 54, the report found, and deaths from opioids in this age group have exceeded those from firearms and car crashes.

“As clinicians, we have the unique power to help end this epidemic,” Murthy wrote in his letter.

To make matters worse, the drugs are often prescribed alongside other drugs, like tranquilizers, which can raise the chances of accidental overdose and death. Yet they’re often prescribed together anyway.

In 2011, 31% of prescription-opioid-related overdose deaths involved these two kinds of drugs used together, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “Unfortunately, too many patients are still co-prescribed opioid pain relievers and benzodiazepines (tranquilizers),” the institute said.

Here’s the surgeon general’s letter:

Filed under: General Problems | 30 Comments »

Observers offer tips on how to survive your doctor or hospital

http://www.northjersey.com/news/health-news/observers-offer-tips-on-how-to-survive-your-doctor-or-hospital-1.1650967

Filed under: General Problems | 2 Comments »

Government Forced To Return 55 lbs of Marijuana, Firearms, Bulletproof Vests and Truck After Verdict

 

countercurrentnews.com/2016/08/government-returns-55-lbs-verdict/

Michael Cindrich won a “Not Guilty” verdict from a Los Angeles, California jury in just a ten minute deliberation. That is what you can do if you know the law.

Jeff Caldwell of LibertyViral reports that Cindrich’s client has a medical cannabis card and rights to be a collective operator. A collective operator has the rights to buy and sell cannabis to a small group of medical cannabis users.

The police ILLEGALLY raided his house, taking all of his money and valuables.

Cindrich was able to recover 55 pounds of MMJ, 3 ounces of concentrate, a Toyota truck, 3 handguns, 2 hunting rifles, an AR-15, 2 bullet proof vests, ammo, and other items. He continues to fight for the release of $150,000 in cash and a motorcycle that, also stolen by police in the illegal raid.

This is Cindrich’s third cannabis-related not guilty verdict in four months.

Know the laws, know your rights. We cannot let cops break the laws and steal possessions. Illegal raids have to stop, that isn’t freedom.

Filed under: General Problems | 4 Comments »

When John Kennedy took office Jan, 1961 our country was a total of 300 billion in debt. A debt that had been accumulated over the previous 185 yrs of the USA’s existence.. including the fighting of TWO WORLD WARS, a CIVIL WAR ,the WAR of 1812 and the Korean War

This fiscal year’s budget short fall – ONE YEAR – will be about TWICE the amount that took our country 185 years to reach in debt

Today our country is abt TWENTY TRILLION in debt. Four those of you who are weak on math .. over the last 55 yrs our national debt has grown SEVENTY TIMES..

Because “we the people” really owe that debt… in 1961 each person owed about $1,700

Today each person owes abt $62,500

Also considering that there are an additional 150 million people in our country now as opposed to 1961.

Both political parties are equally guilty for all of these giveaways.. for various reasons.. Don’t forget that Congress also stripped all the “excess money” in all the Medicare/SS/Railroad/Medicare disability trust funds and filled those “trust funds” with IOU’s from Uncle Sam.

when you chose who to vote for in the upcoming election… the more they use the word FREE.. promising you something… healthcare, college education,,, etc,,,,etc… they are going to put it on our nation’s “credit card”… which our children, grandchildren and great grandkids will have to deal with.

We are already dealing with a generation that it is questionable if their life will be better than that of their parents… the first time in the USA’s history.

 

Filed under: General Problems | 1 Comment »

Filed under: General Problems | Leave a Comment »

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/opioid-epidemic-greatly-exaggerated

Brian C. Bennett Drug Charts  This link takes you to dozens of charts that demonstrates that in the “larger picture” the abuse of various substances has been greatly exaggerated and inflated by the bureaucracy and the media. When did the media become part of our society’s “morality police” and stopped reporting the news/truth and started reporting their opinions ? The media has always had editors that have expressed their opinions, but they were labeled as such.

Last week, when Michael Walker of Beckley, West Virginia, read in his local paper that high-potency heroin—or opioids sold as or cut with heroin—caused an outbreak of 27 overdoses in just four hours in the nearby city of Huntington, he thought of his 19-year-old son, Matthew, who has been off of opiates for three months, the longest he’s been without the drug in years.

“I know it’s early for Matthew, and what a struggle it still is,” said Walker, 42, a white working-class dad. “A lot of people call this a problem, but it’s an epidemic,” he said, while describing the situation in West Virginia.

West Virginia ranks No. 1 in the nation for overdose fatalities. Pill mills churning out OxyContin addicted many in Walker’s hometown, including his son. Once the dirty doctors were kicked out of town and the pill supply ran dry, Walker said his son turned to heroin. “You could walk down the street and knock on someone’s door, and there heroin was,” he said. 

Situations like the one in West Virginia sound off the opioid epidemic siren. Both local and national news carry its echo across the country, citing each outbreak as the relentless continuation of an ongoing drug crisis—one that’s described as having crept out of the so called inner-city and into affluent suburbs and rural towns, causing premature death en masse among the white population. Ask someone like Walker—middle-aged, working class, who is up on current events about opiates and heroin—and they’ll tell you how dire things are.  

But researchers at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, Texas, say government data do not reflect what the media and politicians have said about the magnitude of the epidemic. 

The Baker Institute’s newly released Brian C. Bennett Drug Charts use data collected by the University of Michigan’s Monitoring The Future survey, along with the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, to chart drug-using trends over a span of 40 years. The charts deliver a bird’s-eye view of drug use in America and a counter-narrative to the opioid epidemic. 

Along with the charts—which we’ll get to—Rice University released a policy brief written by William Martin and Katherine Neill, both doctoral fellows in drug policy at Rice. “These charts,” they write, “caution against uncritically accepting alarming announcements of drug abuse epidemics by media, politicians, religious leaders, law enforcement agencies, drug treatment facilities, voluntary associations, or others with real or opportunistic reasons to sound the klaxon.”

Brian C. Bennett is a former military intelligence analyst who uses data to destruct drug war rhetoric. For years, he’s been a thorn in the side of many drug prohibitionists—mainly because his encyclopedic catalog of drug-using trends poke holes in what he calls prohibitionist fear-mongering. Like the time Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, who founded the DARE drug education program, said that “casual drug users should be taken out and shot.” 

That would be a lot of people dead in the streets. Many people identify as regular drug users each year, and the number of people who call themselves a “frequent-user” remains stable, despite screams that drug use is on the rise.  

In reference to cocaine users, which the LAPD targeted during the ’80s crack epidemic, the authors of the policy brief write, “It is clear that not all use is abuse and that most people who get into trouble with the drug recover from it, many on their own without treatment, participation in a 12-step recovery program, or relapse.” Rarely will you hear law enforcement speak of cocaine use in such plain terms. But that’s what the data show. 

The Fix reached out to Bennett to discuss his newly released charts, and how the numbers behind the opiate crisis paint a less frightening picture.  

Bennett’s charts appear counterintuitive if you’ve been watching the news. For instance, they show heroin use has remained stable between 1979 and 2014. Though there was a jump to 914,000 heroin users from 681,000 between 2013 and 2014, he asks his audience to keep in mind the size of the U.S. population ages 12 and older, which in 2014 was over 265 million. 

Because the charts are scaled to the U.S. population at large, such fluctuations look like flat lines—“insignificant in the big picture when charted,” he said.

The same can be applied to painkillers like OxyContin, says Bennett. In 2014, the number of people who reported using painkillers for “nonmedical use” in the past month was 5.1 million. Martin and Neill, the authors of the policy brief, write, “This is not a small number of potentially problematic users, but it is a small segment of the U.S. population—1.6 percent of those age 12 and older.” 

Bennett told The Fix that, “When looking at pills, the past year use numbers have been declining a bit.” But if you get your information from, say, the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, who wield a budget of $88.4 million dedicated solely to keeping kids off drugs, they’ll tell you painkiller use is on the rise. 

“There was a brief spike in the use of [painkillers] in the 2009 and 2010 estimates,” said Bennett. But he adds that ad hoc reports exaggerate these upticks. “This helps illustrate an important point concerning reporting of these numbers: the tendency is to cherry pick the numbers to paint the worst possible picture. That is why it is so important to consider the complete data sets when discussing these issues.“

Since the number of heroin users has not spiked dramatically over the years, then what about mortality rates? After all, the CDC reported a record number of drug overdoses—47,055—in 2014. 

“If you compare the number of deaths to the number of [heroin] users, you find that not many of them are actually dying,” said Bennett. Again, the data backs him up: around 900,000 people reported using heroin in 2014 but only 10,574 of them died. That amounts to only 1.16 percent of heroin users dying from the drug. 

“The claim of ‘record numbers’ of deaths may be accurate—but rather insignificant in the big picture,” Bennett said. 

“Let us consider the total number of deaths,” he continued. “In 2014, there were 2,626,418 deaths. Thus the ‘epidemic’ of opioid deaths is greatly exaggerated, and constitutes a mere 0.6 percent of all deaths.” For some context, Bennett said to look to the infant mortality rate, which is currently 582 per 100,000 live births. 

But such statements fly in the face of people like Walker in West Virginia, and many others who have lost loved ones to overdose. “The people that are on the front lines see the hurt and the utter devastation that this is causing,” he said, adding that the people in power could care less about the state of affairs in West Virginia. 

Martin and Neill acknowledge the data do indeed reflect Walker’s experience. “Midwest regions near the Appalachian Mountains have higher levels of problematic opioid use than other parts of the country,” they write, noting West Virginia has the highest rate in the country, at 35.5 per 100,000. To this, they attribute economic insecurity as one of the major culprits driving up overdose rates. 

But Bennett says local data and anecdotal experiences must not trump the “big picture,” especially when it comes to making sensible policy reforms. What do those reforms look like for Bennett? “Let people get drugs of known dose and purity—via pharmacies for chemical compounds, and via the tobacco/alcohol model for naturally occurring forms of intoxicants,” like mushrooms, peyote, or opium, he said. 

As for why there has been exaggeration about the opioid problem, the researchers at Rice say it has to do with who is now affected by opioids. “To put it bluntly, White Lives Matter,” they write.

The CDC has been tracking the recent demographic shift in opiate use. In 2000, black Americans aged 45-64 were the dominant opiate users. Within the last decade, the largest group of opiate users became whites aged 18-25. Because 90 percent of new heroin users—like Walker’s son—are white, the researchers say it is seen as a public health problem deserving of our attention.

And still, heroin use remains a big problem in minority communities, especially where economic and social resources are scarce. 

“Ultimately, the blame for the hysteria lies squarely at the feet of the government agencies for describing their findings the way they do, and the media parrots who do nothing but pass it along unchallenged—or worse, further exaggerate and magnify the hysteria,” said Bennett.

The team at Rice insists an accurate picture of drug use in America will lead to better policy. “Policies that can deal effectively with these complex problems must build on a foundation of accurate data, not fear and stereotypes.”

“The way forward is not via the roads of the past,” said Bennett.

Meanwhile, all Walker says he can do for his son is pray. Walker wants to become an activist and voice for change, but he says people in his community have not been willing to give him a platform. “They don’t want to hear it,” he said.

Filed under: General Problems | 5 Comments »

CDC: Fentanyl Urgent Public Health Prob

www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2016/8/26/cdc-fentanyl-an-urgent-public-health-problem

Who believes that the alphabet soup of federal agencies will change their direction of believing that legal opiate prescribing  is the major/direct cause of opiate addiction/abuse ? Maybe this information will force the DEA and others in law enforcement to change their enforcement focus. Maybe it will be a moment of ENLIGHTENMENT to politicians/bureaucrats that trying to “cure” those suffering from the mental health disease of addictive personality disorder is just making all of the increased numbers of substance abuse centers a revolving door and creating a “golden goose” for those for profit entities.  Maybe we will follow the lead of other countries and treat substance abuse like other mental health issue and you treat/maintain… you cannot cure… Doing this will cause the drug cartels to have few customers… it will shred their business plan.. they will have to find another illicit business plan to make money.

As a society, we try to use the same/similar puritanical thread in our societal fabric to “cure” those who are in LGBTQ community.. Another failure of that 17th century mindset that persist within some in our society.  No longer on our society’s radar is the ONE MILLION attempted suicide and 50,000 that succeed every year.. we are likewise oblivious to the > 500,000 deaths every year from the use/abuse of the two drugs Nicotine/Alcohol.

Maybe one day the “morality police” will come to the conclusion that there are some within our society that are or will get into a  “death spiral”  and try as we may… they can’t be saved from crashing.

August 26, 2016

Filed under: General Problems | 3 Comments »