A Boom in prescription painkillers drove the opioid crisis. Now there are pills to solve it
When it comes to killing pain these days, a prescription for a high powered opioid is no longer enough. Once you’re taking, say, OxyContin or hydrocodone on a regular basis, you’ll probably get pills for the side effects : pills to help you use the bathroom when the drugs numb the receptors in your intestines that are supposed to help move things along.
If you become addicted to painkillers, there are pills to help you stop taking the pills, by reducing the symptoms of withdrawal. And if you take too many pills, there’s a pill for that too. Or, rather, there’s a nasal spray, or an injection, or a nifty $4,100 auto-injector that announces, through a tiny speaker, how to use it to reverse the effects of an overdose.
In medical world, this phenomenon is known as a drug cascade, and with
hundreds of millions of opioid prescriptions flooding American homes, the opioid cascade has become, over the past five years, a multibillion-dollar business. ” All of these different medicines just start to pile on, ” says Dr. Andrew kolodny, a senior scientist at Brandies University and an expert on opioid policy.
In some cases, government initiatives have been the force behind more demand for drugs that treat addiction and overdose in 2015 alone, state and federal guidelines have encouraged doctors to co-prescribe opioids with a drug that reverses an overdose — just in case. Police and first responders have stocked up on the overdose-reversal drug too…………..
To Read Full Story Please Subscribe to the Time Magazine in Pakistan