Why Are So Many People Dying From Opioid Overdoses?

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From The Guardian: In a society where unemployment is prevalent and people feel isolated from friends, family, and community, opioid use has become a coping mechanism to reduce despair. Rather than medicalizing and criminalizing opioid abuse, we should offer solutions based on social inclusion and compassion.

“Society’s response has been understandably desperate but generally wrongheaded. We start by blaming addicts. Then we blame the pharmaceutical companies for developing and marketing painkillers. We blame doctors, for overprescribing opiates, which pressures them to underprescribe, which drives patients to street drugs – cheaper, home delivery via the internet, and zero quality control. We say we’re going to reignite the war on drugs, recognised by experts as a colossal failure from the 1930s onward. We also continue to view addiction as a chronic brain disease, so the benefits of education, social support, psychological intervention, and personal empowerment receive far too little attention. Yes, addiction involves brain change, but ongoing medicalisation does little to combat it.”

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4 COMMENTS

  1. THERE IS NO OPIOID OVERDOSE CRISIS!

    Very few people ever die from a single dose of a drug in the opioid family. AND PRINCE DID NOT DIE FROM A FENTANYL OVERDOSE!

    This is a POLY-DRUG OVERDOSE CRISIS where BENZODIAZEPINES play a particularly deadly role in these overdoses. Prince, Michael Jackson, and almost all these other celebrities that have died of a drug overdose have had one or more benzos in their system at the time of their death.

    BENZOS are often “THE” DECISIVE component in a deadly cocktail of drugs ingested by those people dying from a poly-drug overdose.

    And Psychiatry has played a DECISIVE role in creating the conditions for the massive over prescribing of benzos in the world.

    Benzos have a documented role of at least 30% involvement in overdose deaths. I believe that figure would be much closer to 5o% if all the statistics were readily available and accessible for evaluation.

    Sixty percent of all regular opiate users also use benzos on a regular basis. Benzos greatly magnify the “high” when combined with opiates.

    We need to challenge all those who continue to label this an “opioid crisis.”

    Richard

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  2. The news media and television could be saving countless lives every day if they were running non-stop headlines about the dangers of drug mixing, but they are not.

    On March 5, 1982, Belushi was found dead in his hotel room at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, having been injected with a “speedball”, a mixture of heroin and cocaine. It became part of the culture or common knowlege that speedballs are death.

    With today’s fake news the headlines for Belushi if that happened today would be “Another Opiate Death” maybe they would say something about other drugs being involved and the end of the article.

    Notable deaths attributed to speedball use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedball_(drug)#Notable_deaths_attributed_to_speedball_use

    10 Celebrities Who Died from a Heroin-Cocaine Speedball http://www.popcrunch.com/10-celebrities-who-died-from-a-heroin-cocaine-speedball/?img=166269

    Celebrities who died from painkillers and heroin – CNN.com http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/03/health/gallery/celebrities-who-died-from-opiods/index.html

    Then Fake news CNN goes on to list the people who died from speed-balling after its fake headline. Then of course when they get called out as fake news they headline is “Trump Supporters Call CNN Fake News” NO everyone is sick of you CNN. And controlled opposition Fox News all you mainstream monopoly clowns.

    More than a quarter of overdose deaths in New York City involve mixing three drugs together, with the most common combination being heroin, cocaine, and alcohol. … Cocaine, alcohol, and benzodiazepines can be fatal when mixed with opioids.

    “Benzodiazepines were found in 60% of overdose deaths involving Synthetic Opioids, 36% of deaths involving heroin, and 58% of deaths involving methadone in 2013. Alcohol was found in over half of the unintentional drug deaths during the last three recorded years” – New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene August, 2014

    Keep calling it an “opiate epidemic” FAKE NEWS, you are killing people.

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