Oxycontin

Prescription Drug Reduction Creates Unintended Consequences, But No Surprises

December 8, 2012 by Recovery Blogger 1 Comment

With crackdowns increasing on improperly-prescribed and illegal prescription drugs, more pill users are turning to heroin, according to studies in Maryland. Prescription drug overdoses are down by 15%, but heroin ODs are up 41%. The total number of combined overdoses is up about 6%. That’s probably because naïve users have greater difficulty managing heroin dosage than they do with the controlled strength of pills.

This shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Reducing the availability of prescription drugs will probably reduce the number of new addicts to a limited degree, but folks who are already addicted aren’t going to be kept from copping. Most prescription drug users, pushed by the fear or actuality of acute withdrawal, will have no trouble finding street drugs, and when the availability of pills drops on the street, the move to heroin is simple and obvious.

That might sound like I’m against nailing the pill mills. Not at all. Those sorry excuses for physicians are a blight on society, and need to be dealt with. Ditto the folks who sell drugs on the street. But anyone who thought addicts would come flocking to get help when their supplies got scarce really doesn’t get the facts of addiction.

Bottom line: addicts will find drugs. If treatment was supported nearly as well as the so-called “War On Drugs;” if addicts could more easily access detox and primary treatment; if the focus of society was less on punitive measures and more on curative ones, then our drug problems could be dealt with far more effectively.

We’re finally getting the idea across that addiction is a disease, and that addicts need to be dealt with as patients, not as offenders, but until society gets behind treatment instead of spending huge sums supporting the drug suppression/law enforcement industries, we don’t have much chance to make real inroads into the overall problem.

I’m a former law enforcement officer and a recovering addict. I’ve seen it from both sides, and I’m telling you that we are putting our priorities in the wrong place. Deal with the criminals on one end, but reduce the number of customers on the other. Put people first, and we have a shot at making real progress.

Filed Under: Addiction, Heroin, Law, Oxycontin, Painkillers, Treatment Tagged With: , , ,

The Reality of Addiction All Around Us

October 19, 2012 by John F. Moriarty III Leave a Comment

I had an ironic encounter with someone the night before the Seabrook House Foundation’s Charity Golf Tournament that really made me thankful for where I’m at now in my life.

For those who don’t know me that well, I have been sober going on 12 years now and abstinent from gambling for the past 4 years. As I was waiting for my colleague’s flight to arrive,  I decided to sit and watch the Giant’s game that was on TV at the hotel bar. Some people may have raised an eyebrow at a recovering alcoholic/gambler sitting in a hotel lobby bar 7 miles from Atlantic City on a Thursday night watching a football game, but fortunately for me, today I can watch a game with my favorite Diet Coke.

After a while watching the game, my legs were bothering me more than normal,  and that led me to limp a tad more than I normally do. The waitress noticed,  and asked me immediately what I was taking for the pain. When I told her Tylenol she asked me “Why not Oxycontin?“.

Sallie, as I will call her, seemed sincere and innocent with her question. As an addiction professional my mind started to realize the reality of living in a society ignorant about prescription opiates. This young woman spoke of Oxycontin as innocently as a Tylenol.  I expressed to Sallie that I felt the danger of dependence with those types of drugs was not worth the risk. She agreed. When I told her I worked for Sunrise Detox Center and was attending a fundraiser to support a local foundation for treatment, her jaw hit the floor.

After a few moments, Sallie re-engaged me in our conversation.  She confided in me that she had had an addiction problem at one time with Oxycontin. She had stolen from her boyfriend and father in the past to support her habit and now she was on Suboxone,  but felt she couldn’t  get off of that either. When I asked her why, she said, “I’m terrified.”

I recognized the look on her face. I knew I was there once before, lost in the panic and confusion of addiction. Sallie told me that her job waiting tables didn’t help her avoid addiction either, as some of her colleagues offered her drugs on a daily basis.

I told Sallie that had many options available to her.  I gave her our admissions number – (888)443-3869, and  I strongly recommended detox plus 28 days of rehab. I explained it would give her the best chance of success. I also encouraged her to seek support in 12 steps. Especially as a woman who had long term sobriety.

As I left for the airport to pick up my colleague, I realized that I am lucky to have found recovery, and lucky to be working at Sunrise Detox. I have acquired so much of the knowledge I have today about addiction from my work with Sunrise Detox.

I also left the sports bar thinking that maybe someone or something had put me in that ironic situation,  so that I could possibly affect Sallie’s life in a positive way, and be reminded of my good fortune and the results of my own recovery efforts.

Filed Under: Addiction, Addiction Education, Drug Addiction, Oxycontin, Recovery

I’ve heard that opiate overdoses often occur when users relapse. Is this true? What’s the deal?

September 8, 2011 by Recovery Blogger

It is true, but in order to give you a good overview, let’s talk about overdoses (ODs) in general.

Most overdoses are caused by people mixing drugs such as heroin, alcohol, methadone and benzodiazepines (Valium, Xanax, Ativan and similar “tranquilizers”). These drugs are all central nervous system (CNS) depressants. When used together, there can be a synergistic effect, where the presence of both drugs creates more CNS depression than either could alone — sort of a 1+1=3 effect.

In an OD, they cause unconsciousness, slow the heartbeat and depress breathing. In lethal doses (LD), the user dies from suffocation when breathing ceases entirely. However, a lethal dose of a drug or drugs is not necessary in order for you to die. If you are lying on your back and unable to swallow because of CNS depression, a small quantity of liquid, such as vomit, can cause suffocation. This has killed many people who would probably have survived the OD otherwise.

There is also the matter of misjudging the amount of drugs in your system. Most drugs taken by mouth reach their highest levels in the body quite some time after they begin to have a noticeable effect — as long as 30 minutes to as much as 4 hours. You can easily become dissatisfied with the effects and continue to swallow more, then down the line the blood levels continue to rise and give you more than you bargained for. It is not uncommon for this to happen when mixing oral and injected drugs. The pills aren’t getting the job done, so you crush and inject and — whammo!

Finally, we get to the issue you asked about. Opiate tolerance drops rapidly when you’re not using. People who have abstained from drugs during detox and treatment, or while in jail or prison, end up with a very low tolerance in comparison to what they had when they stopped using.

If a person who has been abstinent for several weeks relapses, they will require much smaller doses in order to get high. This kills thousands of addicts every year, because the lethal dose (LD) drops as well. If they go back to using anything close to what they used previously, an OD is not only possible, but likely. People most at risk are those getting out of detox and treatment, or out of prison.

The best defense, of course, is to hit meetings, use your supports and stay clean. But if you think you need another run, be really careful or it may be your last.

Filed Under: Addiction, Addiction Education, Drug Addiction, Methadone, Opiates, Oxycontin, Painkillers, Recovery

Is Medical Detox Really Necessary?

September 4, 2011 by Recovery Blogger Leave a Comment

I received an email from a hard-nosed recovering addict/alcoholic who stated, in essence, that inpatient detox isn’t necessary, that he did it on his own, and that all anyone needs is a (little of this, little of that) to get through it just fine, and he knows a bunch of folks who did it that way, and…blah, blah, blah.

I replied, politely, that everyone is different, and that just because it worked for some does not mean that it will work for everyone, and that detox is too important to take a chance on getting it wrong (or killing someone).  I refrained from asking how many of his acquaintances had a successful detox, culminating in long-term happy sobriety with no relapse.

In my years around the 12-step rooms I’ve heard similar comments every now and then.  Some guy (it’s nearly always a guy) makes some remark to the effect that if it was good enough for him and Christopher Columbus, it ought to be good enough for all these young whippersnappers.  Somehow I don’t see how surviving the threat of seizures, heart attack, stroke, DTs, profound depression and a variety of other jackpots (depending on the drug or mixture of drugs) proves anything, except that you were one of the lucky ones, but maybe that’s just me.

Just about any drug that will alter your mood noticeably can be addictive, including weed.  Getting off any of them can create enough withdrawal symptoms that it can be really difficult to make it through a self-detox, although not all are physically dangerous.  (Of course you could argue that things like possible psychotic episodes and profound depression are physically dangerous, but we’ll let that go for another time.)

The bottom line, though, is this: Under the supervision of medical personnel who are trained to administer the proper medication and equipped to handle any problems, detox can be surprisingly comfortable.  Lacking that, there can be some nasty surprises.  Not everyone has complications, which explains the position of the scoffers, but enough folks do that it’s not worth taking a chance if you don’t have to.

Filed Under: Addiction, Alcohol Abuse, Alcoholism, Benzodiazepines, Detox, Drug Addiction, Medical Issues, Opiates, Oxycontin, Painkillers, Relapse Tagged With: , , ,

15 arrested in strike against ring smuggling prescriptions to Mexico – The Washington Post

August 21, 2011 by Recovery Blogger Leave a Comment

Dealers in Southern California provided hydrocodone prescription drugs to pharmacies in TJ, for resale to primarily American tourists.

Hydrocodone, nearly as powerful as morphine, caused 2,499 deaths in the United States from 1998 to 2002, the most recent data analyzed by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA says there were 130 million prescriptions written in 2006, up nearly 50 percent over six years.

APNewsBreak: 15 arrested in strike against ring smuggling prescriptions to Mexico

Filed Under: Addiction, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Law, Opiates, Oxycontin, Painkillers

Inpatient or Outpatient Detox — What’s Best?

August 2, 2011 by Recovery Blogger Leave a Comment

In order to understand why outpatient detox for drug addicts and alcoholics rarely gives satisfactory results, we have to review a couple of things about addiction.

Addiction is a compulsion to use a substance or behavior to alter the way we feel. However, it is more than that: it is a physical and emotional way of living our lives that, over time, becomes ingrained and seems to be the normal way to live. Addiction makes changes in our brains that cause us to believe that we need the drug or mood-altering experience — be it a prescription medication like Xanax, an illegal drug such as heroin, multiple sex partners, alcohol (the most commonly-abused drug of all), or something else. We believe that we need it to feel normal, to be comfortable — to live — and every time we try to get the monkey off our backs we have those beliefs reinforced by the discomfort of withdrawal.

Living like this for long periods, we begin to view it as normal. No creature willingly goes from situations that seem normal into those that seem different [Read more...]

Filed Under: Addiction Education, Alcohol Abuse, Alcoholism, Detox, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Mental Health, Oxycontin, Painkillers, Suboxone, Support Groups, Therapy

Drug abuse costs rival those of chronic diseases

May 27, 2011 by Recovery Blogger Leave a Comment

Drug abuse in the US (not including alcohol) costs the economy $193 billion a year, according to a new report.  That figure equals or exceeds the cost of chronic diseases such as diabetes.

Read about it…

Filed Under: Amphetamines, Benzodiazepines, Cannabis-Marijuana, Cocaine, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Methadone, Opiates, Oxycontin, Painkillers Tagged With:
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