The Opioid Epidemic: Was it Preventable?

Morphine. Codeine. OxyContin. If you're familiar with these terms from hearing a doctor's prescription or reading your family member's medicine capsules in the cabinet then you know what opioids are. Even if you aren't fully aware on what the painkiller is or looks like you might of heard how opioids are attached to the massive wave of addiction, abuse, and death that is now reaching the youth. For clarification, opioids are powerful painkillers that come in the form of natural, semi-synthetic, and fully-synthetic. Common illegal, synthetic forms of opioids that have been greatly linked to addiction and deaths are heroin and fentanyl.

At first my perception was that opioids are becoming so dangerously popular because there must be more availability and the youth of this generation is more addicted to narcotics at a rate that we've never seen before. Turns out I wasn't entirely wrong. After reading the long read "The making of an opioid epidemic", by Chris McGreal, I realized opioids becoming more available to the public wasn't solely due to the black market, the drug companies and medical institution had a major part to play.

Pharmaceuticals push for opioids such as OxyContin being the default painkiller was growing before 2001 since the drug was gaining influence, less restraints on prescribing, and it's so cheap to make. This led to the hospitals adapting pain as the fifth vital sign(blood pressure, heart rate, etc.) which caused patients to exaggerate their pain to either take advantage or because they thought they had to over prioritize it. Health insurance companies pressured doctors to take the easy route of prescribing drugs instead of actually trying to asses the cause of the pain by shortening consultation times and decreasing payments for expensive forms of pain treatment.

Reports that heavy doses of opioids were doing more harm than good, leading people to not only have a high tolerance but also increases their pain sensitivity. They were becoming less and less effective at their intended purpose. Even with the grossing number of deaths due to opioids the drug makers insisted that addiction was only an issue to the abusers who bought them illegally, and if there were too be restrictions it would only hurt the people who actually need the drug for chronic pain.

The truth was that opioids were good for business and brought in millions of dollars yearly so of course the pharmaceutical companies had no intention of stopping production. There were numerous warning signs to reevaluate the mass distribution and prescribing of opioids before they became an epidemic, however the big companies chose to oversee it for nothing other than money purposes. Money makes the world go round and is slowly destroying it in the process. Obviously their intention wasn't to cause so much death and addiction, but it was foreseen by many and could've very easily been prevented. Now we have an entire generation hooked and dying from drugs that are available everywhere they go from hospitals, to the streets, to even their family medicine cabinets.

At what number of deaths will the opioid companies actually do something to cease this worldwide issue? Well we know it's not at the thousands since over 70,000 overdoses due to opioids were reported in 2017 alone. Maybe the hundred thousands or millions? We can only hope that one day human lives are actually valued over money.

Do you think the opioid issue was preventable? What do you think we as a society can do to help stop it?

- Gia Torres