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Offlinex7x_x7x
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Heroin OD deaths spike in Mississippi
    #22064225 - 08/08/15 07:35 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Heroin overdose deaths are skyrocketing in Mississippi, on pace to reach 26 by year’s end.

Several years ago, the state averaged one death a year from the drug, according to state Department of Health numbers.

“A year ago, I might hardly see a heroin addict,” said Dr. Randy Easterling of Vicksburg, medical director of the Marion Hill Chemical Dependency Unit. “Now I see one every day.”

Heroin overdose deaths in the U.S. have nearly quadrupled over the past decade. Experts blame this spike on both contaminated supplies of heroin and using the drug after being addicted to other opioid painkillers, such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, morphine and methadone.

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes clear that heroin, once the scourge of the inner city, has moved into the suburbs with middle-aged white women seeing some of the largest jumps in use of the illegal narcotic.

The CDC is urging states and health care providers to help curb the growing problem by addressing addiction to prescription painkillers, increasing access to substance abuse treatment and expanding access to naloxone, a drug that can help reduce deaths after people suffer opioid overdoses.

Between 2009 and 2011, heroin overdose deaths remained at one per year in Mississippi, according to death certificates collected by the Health Department. In 2012, three were reported. By 2013, that number rose to six.

Those numbers are slightly higher than the heroin deaths reported by county coroners to the state Bureau of Narcotics, which reported one death in 2013 and four deaths in 2014.

More disturbingly, there have been 13 deaths in just the first six months this year, on pace to reach 26 by year’s end.

Easterling, past president of the Mississippi State Medical Association, said many overdose deaths don’t get counted because autopsies are rarely done in these cases.

In each of the past two years in Mississippi, there have been 154 drug overdose deaths reported.

More Americans die annually now from drug overdoses — most of them prescription drug overdoses — than from car accidents.

“We have caused it,” said addiction expert Dr. Scott Hambleton, medical director of the Mississippi Professionals Health Program. “Prescribers have caused it.”

Beginning of the problem

Before the mid-1990s, physicians mainly prescribed opioid painkillers for end-of-life cancer patients.

But after the Food and Drug Administration approved Oxycontin (oxycodone) in 1995, its manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, and others pushed for the drug to be used for chronic pain as well.

In 2007, three Purdue executives pleaded guilty to criminal charges for their role in “misbranding” the drug, wrongly claiming it was less addictive than other opioid painkillers and that it did not cause euphoria.

But by then, it was too late. The market had already been flooded with opioid painkillers, and millions of these pills had filled the nation’s medicine cabinets.

Easterling said one survey showed that if a person took hydrocodone for 90 days, one in three wound up addicted. For those taking hydrocodone one time, that number was one in four.

“This is probably the most addictive medication since crack,” he said. “And it’s more available than crack.”

Mississippi is the sixth highest state per capita in painkiller prescriptions, with 120 prescriptions for each 100 people.

In 2013, Mississippians received more than 119 million hydrocodone combination pills — enough for each man, woman and child to take a pill each day for 40 days. In the wake of stricter prescriber rules, more limited prescriptions and better monitoring, that number fell last year to 104 million.

Many painkiller abusers are turning to heroin, which is cheaper.

Adam Lea, 29, of Brandon was one of those.

Prescriptions for painkillers turned into an addiction that cost him $480 a day before he switched to heroin, which cost $5 to $10 a bag.

His habit grew and grew, and when he tried to go without the drug, he became violently ill.

After several failed attempts in rehab, he has stayed drug free for 57 days at the Addiction Campuses of Mississippi and Tennessee and believes he has finally kicked the habit.

“Once you become chemically dependent, you cannot kick it by yourself,” he said. “You’ve got to have somebody professionally trained.”

Tainted heroin

Sam Owens, director of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, said most of the heroin overdose deaths this year came out of Clarksdale, where a potent form of the narcotic was smuggled into the Mississippi Delta from Chicago.

The work of his agency, together with DEA, helped lead to federal indictments against nine Mississippians, he said. Six have been apprehended, and three more are being sought.

In recent years, Americans have learned that heroin, which exploded into the national consciousness in the late 1960s before fading in popularity, never really went away.

In 2013, Cory Monteith, an actor from the TV show, “Glee,” died after mixing heroin and alcohol. Months later, movie actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died with a syringe in his arm that included heroin, cocaine and other drugs.

Dr. Andrew Kolodny, chief medical officer for the Phoenix House, which offers addiction treatment in 10 states, said heroin brought into the U.S. in recent years has been contaminated with fentanyl, often sold to pain patients in patches. So powerful, fentanyl use can lead to accidental overdoses.

He pointed to recent studies, which found the death rate for adult white women 15 to 54 years old has increased at the same time the rates for black and Hispanic women have declined.

At least half that rise is being blamed on prescription painkiller abuse. Deaths from these painkillers have increased fivefold for women between 1999 and 2010.

Little things can tip an overdose, such as combining a glass of wine, a sleeping pill or an anti-anxiety pill with an opioid painkiller, he said.

Another reason for overdoses is easy access to high-dosage prescriptions, he said.

An 80 mg pill of oxycodone “is a very, very high dose,” Kolodny said.

With many medicines, a patient accidentally swallowing a second pill is no big deal, he said.

In this case, “you may not wake up in the morning,” he said. “Taking an extra pill could kill you.”

In 2013, Kolodny, president of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, and others convinced the FDA to create tougher rules for prescribing opioids. That family of drugs includes morphine, oxycodone, codeine, methadone and heroin.

Before that change, all it took to get hydrocodone — a painkiller in the same family as heroin — was a call-in prescription from a doctor, dentist or nurse practitioner.

“What we’re dealing with is an epidemic opioid addiction,” said Kolodny, president of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. “What we need to do for any disease epidemic is to contain the epidemic and prevent others from getting disease. To prevent the disease, we need to get the medical community to prescribe more cautiously.”

In Mississippi, opioid prescriptions are recorded in the Prescription Monitoring Program, now being used by physicians and law enforcement to help determine if a patient is engaged in “doctor shopping” — getting prescriptions at the same time from multiple physicians.

Frank Gammill, executive director of the state Board of Pharmacy, said with the crackdowns, it is probably easier for an addict to buy his drugs off the street than it is to try and fool both a health care provider and a pharmacist.

Like many other physicians, Dr. Anwant Chawla prescribes Suboxone to opioid addicts, saying it’s almost impossible to overdose on that drug.

The Slidell, Louisiana, doctor, who also sees patients in Picayune, said he tries to gradually wean them off opioids, providing group therapy.

He said he sees 100 patients a day, checking each of them in the Prescription Monitoring Program to make sure they aren’t doctor shopping.

Kolodny questioned seeing so many patients in a single day.

There is unfortunately a shortage now of the drug, he said. “We have people on waiting lists for Suboxone who are dying of drug overdoses.”

Contact Jerry Mitchell at jmitchell@jackson.gannett.com or (601) 961-7064. Follow @jmitchellnews on Twitter.



http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2015/08/08/heroin-od-deaths-spike-mississippi/31330451/


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InvisibleNWlight
Just look

Registered: 01/12/10
Posts: 18,686
Re: Heroin OD deaths spike in Mississippi [Re: x7x_x7x] * 4
    #22064719 - 08/08/15 09:56 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

why is everyone turning to heroin, that's the real question.

says a lot about the place where it's happening, knaw mean?

:suicide:


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OfflineMr. Magic
Male


Registered: 07/13/14
Posts: 1,951
Last seen: 1 year, 5 months
Re: Heroin OD deaths spike in Mississippi [Re: NWlight]
    #22065375 - 08/09/15 12:32 AM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

NWlight said:
why is everyone turning to heroin, that's the real question.

says a lot about the place where it's happening, knaw mean?

:suicide:




Yuppp


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OfflineFreedreamer
Out of place


Registered: 06/22/11
Posts: 270
Loc: Here, there and everywher...
Last seen: 1 year, 1 month
Re: Heroin OD deaths spike in Mississippi [Re: Mr. Magic]
    #22065592 - 08/09/15 02:16 AM (8 years, 5 months ago)

Quote:

Mr. Magic said:
Quote:

NWlight said:
why is everyone turning to heroin, that's the real question.

says a lot about the place where it's happening, knaw mean?

:suicide:




Yuppp




Indeed. It is very unfortunate that the underlying causes for excessive, chronic drug use are never examined. Instead, excessive, chronic drug use is treated as a totally isolated phenomena. Journalists use shock value to sell stories related to drug use while omitting information which may not fit into the standard "devil's dangerous drugs responsible for the evil" narrative.


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"This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window."
- Charles Baudelaire


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Offlineleon trout
Estimated Prophet
Male


Registered: 09/13/12
Posts: 1,089
Loc: The Timbers of Fennario
Last seen: 3 years, 8 months
Re: Heroin OD deaths spike in Mississippi [Re: Freedreamer]
    #22072585 - 08/10/15 04:55 PM (8 years, 5 months ago)

5 of those 13 deaths were friends of mine... so tired of burying my friends... clean since 2004, fuck heroin...


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I read somewhere that 77 per cent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I’m more intrigued by the 23 per cent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.” 
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:gd_icon:the bus come by & i got on, that's when it all began:gd_icon:



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