opiates – Opiate Nation

America’s Love Affair with Opioids

Andrew Sullivan’s 2018 article for the NY Magazine entitled “The Poison We Pick”, wrote: “…For millennia, the Opium Poppy has salved pain, suspended grief, and seduced humans with its intimations of the divine. It was a medicine before there was such a thing as medicine. Every attempt to banish it, destroy it, or prohibit it has failed…This nation pioneered modern life. Now epic numbers of Americans are killing themselves with opioids to escape it…According to the best estimates, opioids will kill up to half a million Americans in the next decade.

“Most of the ways we come to terms with this wave of mass death…miss a deeper American story. It is a story of pain and the search for an end to it. It is a story of how the most ancient painkiller known to humanity has emerged to numb the agonies of the world’s most highly evolved liberal democracy. Continue reading “America’s Love Affair with Opioids”

ANXIETY, Part 2: Appeal of Opioids to Millennials

Is there a particular reason that opioids have such an appeal to Millennials? In an article in the New Yorker Magazine (http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/02/americas-opioid-epidemic.html) entitled “The Poison We Pick,” Andrew Sullivan discusses the modern American life that we pioneered and how “epic numbers of American are killing themselves with opioids to escape it.” Sullivan goes on to say: “It is a story of pain and the search for an end to it. It is a story of how the most ancient painkiller known to humanity has emerged to numb the agonies of the world’s most highly evolved liberal democracy. Just as LSD helps explain the 1960’s, cocaine the 1980’s, and crack the 1990’s, so opium defines this new era. I say era, because this trend will, in all probability, last a very long time. The scale and darkness of this phenomenon is a sign of a civilization in a more acute crisis than we knew, a nation overwhelmed by a warp-speed, postindustrial world, a culture yearning to give up, indifferent to life and death, enraptured by withdrawal and nothingness.” Continue reading “ANXIETY, Part 2: Appeal of Opioids to Millennials”

Medication Assisted Treatment – Part 1

Medication Assisted Treatment, or MAT, is finally gaining acceptance as a response to drug addiction in the US––it is a cultural shift from the view that addiction is a “moral failure.” The Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, one of the top drug treatment providers in the country, used to subscribe almost exclusively to the abstinence-only model, based on an interpretation of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous popularized in American addiction treatment in the past several decades. But in 2012, they announced they would begin providing MAT. There are four opioid substitutes that are used for MAT in opioid addiction: methadone, buprenorphine, naloxone, and naltrexone. More on these in the next blog.

November 6, 2013, the New York Times did an extensive article discussing the development, use, and risks of opioid substitutes, in particular bupreorphine and the combination drug, Suboxone. The author explaining that “While addiction is considered a chronic, relapsing disease, experts believe that replacing illegal drugs with legal ones, needles with pills, or more dangerous opioids with safer ones reduces the harm to addicts and to society. Addicts develop a tolerance to its euphoric effects and describe themselves as normalized by it, their cravings satisfied. It also diminishes the effects of other opioids but, studies have shown, does not entirely block them, even at the highest recommended doses.”

In a Frontline report in 2016, one of the doctors who specializes in addiction medicine related that doctors are limited by the DEA to treat only 100 patients per year with Suboxone. The thought behind this law is that they don’t want it to be abused––and it can be abused, as a commodity sold on the street to ward of withdrawals or for those who cannot afford the cost of a doctor and the medication. Our family faced the dilemma of the high costs for the doctors visits and the Suboxone because they were not covered by our son’s health insurance. We made the decision for him to not use this option, all hoping that a sober living house and meetings would help him succeed in his desire for sobriety. He was dead from a heroin overdose 7 months later.

The physician on Frontline pointed out the contradiction––the contradiction that has frustrated me and my husband for years––that there is still no limit on how many oxycodone or other opioid prescriptions physicians can write—the very abuse of which is documented to be fueling the opiate epidemic and creating the need for Suboxone. I personally experienced this absurd mentality towards opiates when my oral surgeon sent me home with 60 Vicodin after a root canal––60. I used two. He is the same oral surgeon who did JL’s wisdom teeth extraction and gave him multiple prescriptions for Percocet two weeks before and two weeks after the surgery––which fueled his relapse on heroin and ultimately, his death. He should have his license revoked.

As of a 2017 report by SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), physicians who have prescribed buprenorphine/Suboxone to 100 patients for at least one year can now apply to increase their patient limits to 275 under new federal regulations. It is good to see movement in the right direction and I hope there will be more progress soon, especially in terms of making medication options a covered public health care benefit available to addicts who want to get their lives back.

The Hijacked Brain

I watched an interview on the PBS Newshour the other night with a physician whose young son recently died of a heroin overdose. He has started a foundation to help raise awareness and to bring an end to this deadly epidemic. My husband and I connected with him on so many levels: having a wonderful and brilliant son – who desperately wanted to be free of his addiction – die a needless death; the remorse over not knowing what we could have done differently to help our son; the desire to do something to help others before they are forced to share our pain and grief. In the interview he reiterated the truth that few people understand about opioid addiction: once a person is addicted to opioids, they are truly not normal or themselves any more. The drug has hijacked their brain and they are not capable of thinking normally. They must have the drug at any cost.

This is the reason that there are so few opioid addicts who live long enough to enjoy recovery, as opposed to addicts who use uppers like cocaine or meth. As Tracey Helton Mitchell said in her memoir, The Big Fix: “Heroin kept me chasing my tail, but crack (cocaine) finally sent me into recovery.” Our son’s addiction doctor put it this way: “Most people will build up tolerance to opioids and that tolerance is what leads to addiction. Once addicted, it is only over a long period of time with medication and group therapy (like the 12-Steps) that a person has hope of being free. This is why I call it ‘the cancer of brain diseases’.”

In her article in The Washington Post, December 1st, Dr. Sandra Block (a neurologist) gives further evidence as seen on EEG’s on the changes to the brain that opioids cause:

“Neurologically speaking, opioids are crafty. They turn the brain’s own electricity against it, rewiring connections in an endless feedback loop for more drugs. They trick the brain into a death trap, as users chase the chemical bliss from the drugs with more drugs. Acute opioid usage (that is, the high itself) translates into slowing on the EEG. Usually, such an effect is transient, carefully monitored by an anesthesiologist during surgery, for instance. But when the patient becomes the anesthesiologist, the cycle can become lethal…the opioids overwhelm the brain’s respiratory center, causing cardiac arrest… I’m seeing brain death in people who haven’t lived their lives yet, whose brains haven’t even fully developed, brains that are literally killing themselves for drugs.”

My goal in sharing this information is that it will bring awareness to families and friends – and addicts – about why opioids are so pernicious and that we will begin to see those trapped in the addictive spell as individuals who really do want help. Learning what actual help is, as opposed to enabling the addiction, is a topic for another time.