“As of 2015, an estimated 2.6 million Americans were addicted to” opioids, Oliver noted, citing SAMHSA numbers. “And they’re now involved in almost 30,000 overdose deaths a year in the U.S.”
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75% of all those addicted to opioids in the US were not introduced to them by doctors, but got them elsewhere. Furthermore, these people already had a history of problems with other street drugs like cocaine. Indeed, monodrug addicts are actually a minority. That’s not really what addiction is about. It has little to do with any specific drug or activity: it’s something inside the person; it’s a type of behavioral pattern. And if we look at it from the other side: Out of the large number of people who are prescribed opioids for pain, only about 1% develop a problem.
It is sad to see that even this site spreads nonsense about iatrogenic addiction and the like. Apparently, the anti-establishment feeling is so strong here it overrides rational thinking when it comes to addiction.
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P.S.: Paradoxically, this puts you very close to the establishment and its disease model of addiction.
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Explorer86
You are repeating some of the worst lies promoted by Big Pharma and the Pain Industry. The 75% figure is referring to newly addicted people introduced to heroin after first developing an opioid dependency via prescribed pain drugs. The prescribed pain drugs will inevitably become more difficult to obtain from doctors and no longer provide enough of a drug effect. As an alternative, heroin and other related street drugs became more easily accessible and are cheaper to purchase.
And when heroin becomes not enough to get the right effect or too expensive given the amounts needed, that’s when people add benzos which creates the “perfect storm of addiction” that more often than not leads to death from overdose.
The 1% figure (you repeat above) developing a problem with pain drugs, is pure fiction and pharmaceutical propaganda. Long term use of opioid drugs will almost always lead to dependency and/or addiction issues and will often lead to people actually becoming MORE sensitive to pain thus requiring even more drugs to get the same effects.
It is actually a sad fact (and a commentary on the state of modern medicine) that it take a famous comedian to provide some of the very best factual information and analysis of the current opioid drug crisis. This video should be spread very widely to every one possible.
Richard
