By Cliff Montgomery – May 18th, 2016
The modern world’s trend toward greater human health and longevity has, in recent years, all but ceased for poorly-educated white Americans. The death rate for middle-aged women among this group has even begun to rise.
Last Wednesday, BBC News published statements from a number of health and socio-economic experts about these disturbing issues.
The experts revealed that two of the greatest problems are America’s socio-economic class structure and the medical industry’s extreme use of opioid-based prescription pain-killers for poor white people.
On Sunday, we considered the problem of America’s class structure – an especially important matter, since Americans are taught almost from birth not to see their country’s class system.
But today, we’ll uncover the factors behind an alarming increase in opioid prescriptions for poorly-educated white Americans, and why this problem is especially prevalent among middle-aged women.
Opioids are painkillers derived from opium – a substance which serves as the basis for medicinal drugs like morphine and codeine, as well as illicit drugs like heroin. Thus opioids are quite powerful and can be highly addictive.
“I remember looking at some early federal reports involving opioid painkillers and overdose deaths,” Dr. Andrew Kolodny, co-founder and executive director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, told BBC News, “and they had increased so rapidly that … [at first] I was convinced someone had put a decimal point in the wrong place.”
But “the sharp increase was very real,” stated Kolodny, adding that “what we would ultimately come to recognize is that we were at the beginning of a new and very severe epidemic.”
So why did doctors begin prescribing so many opioids? Dr. Kolodny told BBC News that much of the problem comes down “to a brilliant marketing campaign launched by the maker of one opioid pain medicine, a drug called Oxycontin.”
If this sounds a bit like the good doctor is ‘passing the blame’ onto a drug manufacturer, consider that “in 2007, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to misleading doctors and patients about the addictive properties of OxyContin and paid $600m (£415m) in fines,” according to BBC News.
Purdue Pharma “also reformulated OxyContin to deter abuse,” added the news service.
The result of all those opioid prescriptions?
“Rates of overdose deaths [primarily from opioids] begin to soar: From 1999 to 2014, 250,000 Americans have died of an opioid overdose,” Kolodny stated.
“Today there are more Americans dying of drug overdoses than dying from motor vehicle crashes,” he added.
“This is the worst drug addiction epidemic in U.S. history,” declared Dr. Kolodny, with “about 10 to 12 million Americans on opioids chronically.”
That means “drug companies can now make money selling medicines to treat the side effects from being on opioids chronically.”
Said another way, U.S. drug companies like Purdue Pharma may well have created a host of opioid junkies … and now make extra loads of cash helping those junkies deal with their many problems.
“We’ve seen a very sharp increase in prescription opioid overdoses in women,” continues Dr. Kolodny.
“I think one of the reasons is that middle-aged women are more likely to receive treatment for a chronic pain problem from a doctor,” explained Kolodny, adding that “they’re [thus] more likely to be prescribed prescription opioids.”
“This epidemic is almost completely white,” Dr. Kolodny pointed out. “It’s so white that it’s fair to say that it’s protective in some ways to be African-American or Latino.”
Kolodny believes that if a patient is either black or Latino, the deep-seated racism of many doctors may make them “more concerned about the possibility of the patient becoming addicted or of the patient selling their pills.”
“Racial stereotyping is having a protective effect on non-white populations,” added Kolodny.
