opioids

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AKDOG

Mountain climber

Anchorage, AK

May 16, 2018 - 02:09pm PT

published in JAMA in 1980, a letter to the editor with no real evidence goes on to be cited over 600 times in other articles about the low risk of opioid addition when prescribed for chronic pain.

stevep

Boulder climber

Salt Lake, UT

May 16, 2018 - 02:10pm PT

A lot of the current problem goes back to a single letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine back in 1980 that implied that opioids might only rarely be addictive. This was later seized upon by drug manufacturers to push opioids to docs.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/06/nejm-letter-opioids/528840/

Our health system doesn't help, paying docs for services rather than outcomes.

And unfortunately, even though we've partly gotten the prescription opioids under control, too many people were already addicted, and now the issue has moved to illegal drugs, in some cases synthetic opioids much stronger than morphine or oxycontin.

Ha AKDog...we posted about the same article almost at the same time.

Winemaker

Sport climber

Yakima, WA

May 16, 2018 - 02:47pm PT

Putting aside a debate over the death penalty, I've been wondering why there is so much of a problem with states getting death penalty drugs. Wouldn't a large (or even small, apparently) dose of fentanyl do the job? There also seems to be no issue painlessly euthanizing animals; why wouldn't this same procedure work for humans?

Again, I'm NOT advocating for the death penalty!!!

ionlyski

Trad climber

Polebridge, Montana

May 16, 2018 - 04:52pm PT

Aspenboy,

I know that history, you went to wiki. That's fine.

Opium=the gum scraped from the poppy.
main ingredients in opium=morphine, codine, thebaine and I forget whatelse
heroin=synthesized from morphine, then metabolizes back to morphine in the blood stream.

Its no big deal just that you said morphine comes from H and its the other way around. I'd take either before I ever took Bupenorphine which is the what the recovering addicts are being led to.

A

aspendougy

Trad climber

Los Angeles, CA

May 16, 2018 - 06:11pm PT

Ion, my main point in posting the history was only that heroin has been meaninglessly demonized, but I was under the mistaken impression that heroin came directly from opium, not morphine.