Comments: PUCKETT: UPDATED: Hey, look! The AP says everyone is on drugs!
They aren't counting all the prescription pain pills that get dispensed and then either thrown out or sit in a cabinet because the person prescribed them can't tolerate them or doesn't want to use them. For some reason whenever I have been prescribe pain medication post surgery it's always a pretty large prescription but I have never used pain meds for more than one or 2 days, sometimes not at all. So yeah, I probably have had more than the average prescribed to me with several surgeries but I have only actually ingested a few milligrams of prescription pain medications. Which reminds me to either throw the stuff out or donate it to the next caravan to Cuba.....
Posted by Alison Hymes at August 20, 2007 05:13 PM
Thank you for so much for this information, it's astonishing....
Posted by Stephany at August 20, 2007 08:10 PM
So eloquently put, and so very true. Thank you for your excellent words of wisdom!
Posted by Pam at August 21, 2007 12:46 AM
Thanks for pointing out that this is only the prescribed number - many patients don't use the entire prescription and parts of them sit around. I remember at one point in the past, my family doctor of 20 years wrote me a prescription for Vicodin in case I needed it for resting after aggressive physical therapy. Roughly six months to a year later, I went back into his office and produced that prescription - which I had never filled - and asked for another one since I actually needed it now.
Although I'm sure examples like that are VERY rare, I wonder if the DEA factored those in as well. However, the point is clear - the numbers are, at best, misleading and designed to provoke hysteria when the actual numbers strike me as being within reasonable therapeutic and medicinal limits.
On a side note, the DEA has identified Ritalin as a drug of concern.
http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/drugs_concern/index.html
Hell, if we're worried about adults using painkillers that are on the same list, maybe we should stop prescribing so much Ritalin and other drugs in that class to kids?
Posted by Puckett at August 21, 2007 06:59 AM
You're a bit off on you're description using the vicodin.
The 100's of miligrams you are refering to are the non-narcotic part of the pill, the tylenol. (yes tylenol, like the normal 500-1,000mg dose you can get OTC. If you took 5mg of tylenol it would do absolutely nothing for you. And well if you actually took 500mg of hydrocodone you would be dead.)
It is the 5mg of hydrocodone (narcotic) in every pill that you should be using to make your examples.... and if you did it that way you would see clearly that 300mg of narcotic/year for every man woman and child is much more than half a vicoden a year a piece.
It would in fact be 300mg/5mg(actual hydrocodone - synthetic opiate) ='s 60 regular strength vicoden a year for every person in the states.
Now THAT is quite a lot of vicoden going around... (not to say all the narcotic scripts are vicoden, but if you're going to use that as an example, you need to be using the right part of the pill..... and if you don't believe me about there not being 500mg of hydrocodone in vicoden (like many people like to argue) then go ahead and call your local poison control center and ask them what you should do if you just ingested and actual 500mg of Hydrocodone....and see how fast an abulance rushes to your house... and yes, they will try and clarify: "are you reading the bottle right?")
just thought you should know so you can revise your article. It's a common mistake though, even junkies make it and get tricked into buying pills that actually have more tylenol and less hydrocodone because they don't know which # represents what.
peace. be safe with those pills. sometimes they work so well for depression that getting hooked as a depressive Bipolar can be a pretty easy thing. Still the withdrawals are a cake walk compared to ADs, and they do work better for pain. Just watch yourself. And remember:
more than 4,000mg of tylenol a day can kill your liver. And if you drink, well even at 3,000mg a day it can cause damage. If you're worried about it take a daily N-Acetyl-L-Cysteine (NAC) supplement. It replenishes your liver with what it needs to break down the tylenol without having to kill of liver cells.
Hope that info helps.
Posted by katie at August 21, 2007 12:08 PM
Very good points and very useful for clarification. Please read the updated part of the story and the comment below this one for my response.
Posted by Puckett at August 21, 2007 04:18 PM
One final comment on this.
The original AP story by Frank Bass titled "Pain medicine usage has nearly doubled" on Yahoo! News read:
"More than 200,000 pounds of codeine, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone and meperidine were purchased at retail stores during 2005, the most recent year represented in the data. That is enough to give more than 300 milligrams of painkillers to every person in the country."
After talking to four separate editors at the AP, I received no additional clarification around this claim, merely that "it reads fine as it is" and doesn't require any explanation. In my opinion, 1/2 of 1% of the U.S. population being on a type of medication (say, medicine to control hyperactivity or arthritis) isn't statistically meaningful, much less newsworthy, while 151 million monthly prescriptions of narcotics is a public health crisis of Nimitz-class proportions.
I explained this to the AP and they declined to clarify the statistic, so I think my original title is either more correct than anyone wants to admit or the AP had a slow news day and a writer wanted to make the problem of rogue Internet pharmacies sound bigger than it is.
If you're interested in contacting the Associated Press about this, you can call them at +1 212 621 1500. It seems that an editor can be reached 24/7 if you have insomnia.
Tomorrow, I'll phone up the DEA and try to get some answers that clear things up. This saga ain't over yet.
Posted by Puckett at August 21, 2007 07:24 PM
The entire War on Drugs is really a war on American citizens by government bureaucrats intent on assuring year over year budget increases. This is one more example of why Americans must make radical reform of drug policy a top issue in the 2008 election.
http://whatmatters2us.blogspot.com/2007/08/latest-victims-in-war-on-drugs-grandma.html
Posted by Last Man Thinking at August 23, 2007 07:59 AM
AP has far worse problems than slow news. It's figures were off by a factor of ONE-THOUSAND. Here is the correct math:
(200000 lb/yr)/(kg/2.2 lb)(1000 mg/kg)/302665263 persons = 0.3 mg/person/year (Check it yourself.)
Less than 1/3 of a mg of narcotic in a whole year is newsworthy? Eight one-thousandths of a mg a day??? Even if it were all oxycodone, that would be one Percocet 5/325 divided between 6076 people!
A more important story would be the fact that reporters and editors for a major news organization cannot do grade-school math!
By the way, the AP analysis is fundamentally flawed. Codeine, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone, and meperidine have widely different effects for the same weight of drug. For example, it takes roughly 14 mg of meperidinea mg to be "equivalent" to 1 mg of oxycodone by mouth.
With 10-20% of the population in chronic pain, even if that 0.3 mg/person/yr were all oxycodone, the amount of undertreatment implied is staggering. That is the story the numbers actually tell. The story the AP tells is a hoax.
Posted by Dr. Shank at December 14, 2007 11:37 AM