Opiates

Critical psychiatry researcher, anthropologist and NYU professor Helena Hansen writes: “Opioid maintenance acts as a kind of pharmaceutical prosthesis which promises to return white ‘addicts’ to regaining their status as full human persons and middle-class consumers. Meanwhile, black and brown users are not deemed as persons to be rescued, but rather dangerous subjects to be pharmaceutically contained within the public discipline of the state.”

From The Intercept: Newly released documents show that Dr. Scott Gottlieb, President Trump's nominee to lead the FDA, has received almost $45,000 in speaking fees...

From STAT: In recent years, the pharmaceutical industry has proposed using abuse-deterrent opioids - those that make it more difficult to crush, snort, or inject...

From The New York Times: According to the first governmental account of nationwide drug deaths to cover all of 2016, drug overdose deaths increased by...

As part of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government has made a commitment to integrate behavioral health with physical medicine. Physicians have saddled America with addiction to antidepressants, antipsychotics, and benzodiazpines. If the federal government decides that opiate addiction is ok, as they seem to have conceded, shouldn’t the question be “what is the cheapest and the safest opiate?” In Europe, heroin is an option right along with buprenorphine and methadone. It seems to me that the “back-door” legalization of opiates under the guise of “treatment” ought to at least be debated out in the open.

From STAT: New research indicates that doctors who graduated from lower-tier medical schools prescribe about three times as many opioid painkillers per year as those...

From The New York Times: The opioid epidemic is wreaking havoc on Cherokee families and putting Cherokee children at risk. Now, the Cherokee Nation has...

The vast majority of veterans who are taking opioids for pain are also being prescribed one or more psychiatric medications.

People who survive life-threatening illnesses in the intensive care unit (ICU) of a hospital are at high risk for depression and anxiety and nearly...

“The rising death rates for those young white adults, ages 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years of the mid-1960s to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the generation that preceded it,” the ‘Times reports.

Medscape Psychiatry reports that the “man-made epidemic” of opioid abuse in the United States is the result of over-prescription and poor research.

“CBS News went to West Virginia, a state that is attempting a drastic solution: allowing addicts to sue the doctors who got them hooked.”

While plans to involuntary commit drug users have “received virtual across-the-board support,” Susan Sered from TruthOut reports that “there is little to no evidence showing that coerced drug treatment is effective,” and that “having abstained from opiates for several days may set them up to overdose when they return to their former level of drug use, with a reduced tolerance for the drugs.”

A Kentucky judge has ruled that Purdue Pharma will have to release secret documents about the marketing of OxyContin, a potent pain pill that...

NBC News reports that the FDA is taking action in an attempt to make opioid drugs, cousins to opium and heroin, a last-ditch option...

“Health Commissioner Leana Wen will join other health directors across the country today in asking the federal government to require a ‘black box warning’...

“A Los Angeles-area doctor was convicted of murder in a landmark case for killing three patients who overdosed on what a prosecutor called 'crazy,...

Felice J. Freyer for the Boston Globe reports on a new study of chronic pain treatment. “More than 90 percent of people who survived...

The UK Independent reports that Ireland is moving toward a policy of decriminalizing small amount of drugs like heroin, cocaine, and cannabis in what amounts to a “radical cultural shift.” While it would remain a crime to profit from the sale of these substances, users will have specially designated areas for safe use. The chief of Ireland’s National Drugs Strategy told the paper: “I am firmly of the view that there needs to be a cultural shift in how we regard substance misuse if we are to break this cycle and make a serious attempt to tackle drug and alcohol addiction.”

“In 2014, the number of people who died from drug overdoses in the United States reached 47,055 — an all-time high, according to a disturbing report published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),” but “the effort to get physicians to curb their prescribing of these drugs may be faltering amid stiff resistance from drugmakers, industry-funded groups and, now, even other public health officials.”

A new poll, published in the Washington Post, explores the public’s connection to prescription pain killer abuse. “A surprising 56 percent of the public say...