From the article:
Overdose deaths from both prescription opioids and heroin continued to rise in 2011, the most recent year for which data were available, according to the CDC.
While prescription opioid deaths followed a more than decade-long trend and increased about 2% to 16,917, heroin deaths jumped by 44% — from 3,036 in 2010 to 4,397.
Officials with the CDC said the increase in heroin deaths may be partly due to users having less access to prescription opioids and switching to the illicit drug.
It has been reported again and again that people who tend to abuse some substance(s) that they often get drugs/substances of various strengths and various mixture of some unknown substances.. off the street…tend to die from over doses… more often than those that use legal drugs illegally.
So.. according to these numbers.. it would seem that the DEA has put more resources into preventing the diversion of legal drugs to the street and in turn… does this mean that less resources are being dedicated to keeping ILLEGAL DRUGS … particularly Heroin being on the street .. and thus .. more people are dying .. than might otherwise have died.. if the DEA focused more on the ILLEGAL DRUGS and substances getting to the street .. could fewer people be dying of drug overdoses ?
Do we need to change the laws that any prescriber could help people who have a issue with substance abuse to try and help them to becoming a “functional abuser”.. rather than keep playing this cat & mouse game between them and law enforcement.
Of course, both do get what they want.. law enforcement keeps drawing a paycheck and the substance abusers keeps getting some substance to abuse.. somewhere..
Filed under: General Problems
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/stop-discrimination-against-patients-chronic-painful-disease-or-injuries-dea-pharmacies-and/zjzx2hpN
Only 110 people have signed this. Actually asking for relief for pharmacies too. Can you imagine chronic pain and patients working with a pharmacist? Seems like all would want relief from DEA
Steve,
Your correct this whole idea of making much needed pain medications hard to get for true pain sufferers has hurt not just us that suffer from chronic pain but people who abuse these medications and illegal drugs. If this entity would have never messed with things less abusers would have died of heroin overdoses. So this entity stops doing what they get paid for keeping illegal drugs off the streets and go after pharmacists and pain docs. all along drawing the same pay.
This entity that keeps messing things up should have left things as they where.
As it is we that suffer from chronic pain cant get our LEGAL scripts filled and abusers will go back to ILLEGAL substances or BOTH and what happens then,
can we all say it together,
(THEY DIE OF A OVERDOSE FROM A ILLIGAL DRUG CALLED HEROIN)
What a messed up set of circumstances ,its bad enough chronic pain sufferers are suffering even more because of this,so what has been accomplished by this entity.
can we all say it together,
(NOTHING AT ALL BUT MORE SUFFERING FROM CHRONIC PAIN SUFFERERS WHO SUFFER ENOUGH AS IT IS)
And meanwhile, the drug lords and cartels just keep laughing.