The 1970s was a decade in which monumental changes took place in America. Some were good and some bad. One of the bad ones has continued to get worse. The number of unintentional fatal drug overdoses has climbed ever since the explosion of the drug culture in the early ?70s.
One would think that better education, enforcement and the harsh reality of all the needless drug deaths of the past would have made a dent in fatal overdose numbers. Instead, over the five-year period from 1999 through 2004, U.S. drug overdose deaths doubled. Unintentional fatal drug overdose is now the second leading cause of accidental death in this country. Motor vehicle accidents are the only category higher.
There is an interesting twist to the extremely rapid ascent of the overdose death toll. The primary killers are no longer the evil ones of the past; illegal heroin and cocaine. The new grim reapers are powerful and legal prescription painkillers. Often the people who wind up dead from the use and abuse of these drugs could actually produce a valid prescription for the medication, if they were still alive. The drugs causing the problem are called “opioids” and they include hydrocodone, oxycodone, methadone and fentanyl.
A high profile case, earlier this year, was the death of actor Heath Ledger. His autopsy indicated that his system contained a number of opioids and the authorities discovered that he had legal prescriptions for the medications.
There are other deviations associated with the rise in prescription drug overdose fatalities. In the past, when heroin and cocaine fueled the drug overdose problem, they were more closely affiliated with urban areas. The new epidemic is more common to the rural areas of the country and deaths have more than doubled in the states of the South. West Virginia led the country from 1999-2004 with an increase of 550 percent.
The South is where I first encountered this new wave of drug overdoses. From 2001 to 2003, I managed newspapers in southern Louisiana. The economy was agriculture based. Lots of rice was grown and crawfish were harvested from flooded rice fields left unplanted. In a short span of time, several local people died from overdosing on crushed OxyContin pills. One of our award-winning reporters researched the issue and wrote a three-part series of articles about the crisis.
Our reporter”s investigation found that there were a number of doctors, several in Houston, Texas, who placed money above the safety and well-being of their patients. These doctors could always be counted on to provide an individual with prescriptions for painkillers.
The corrupt doctors lost some of their patients to fatal overdoses, which didn”t help repeat business. But, the growing number of people who sought the medications from them took care of customer attrition.
One other aberration, from the five years in which overdose deaths doubled, is puzzling. The group with the highest percentage of increase in fatal overdoses was white females. The rate of fatalities in this category was up 136.5 percent, a jump of more than twice the increase for white males.
Not everyone has a prescription for the medications they ingest. Across the country, high school students have been raiding their parents” medicine cabinet and selling or providing drugs for pill parties. There was an incident at Lower Lake High School last spring in which a few students became ill from an overdose of a powerful prescription drug.
The solution to the unintentional overdose death problem involves a number of groups. The drug manufacturers need to modify the drugs to make them more difficult to tamper with, or less powerful when altered by crushing or dissolving. Pharmacies, insurers, parents and especially physicians must devise systems to reduce the opportunities for people who don”t need painkillers from getting their hands on them. Decreasing the more than 16,000 overdose deaths per year is a good reason for them to figure it out.
Gary Dickson is the publisher of the Record-Bee. He can be reached at gdickson@record-bee.com or called direct at 263-5636 ext. 24.
