HOOKED
crease: The Drug War, according to
a January 2012 report from Radley
Balko. Government crackdowns
have made it difficult for even reputable doctors to prescribe pain
pills. To fill the void, doctors and
others looking to make a buck off
the prescription pills created socalled “pill mills” — offices that
prescribe pain medication in high
volume and often serve people addicted to the drugs.
The result: Nearly four out of five
people who recently started using
heroin used prescription painkillers first, according to a 2013 study
from the Center for Behavioral
Health Statistics and Quality.
“A lot of people who got in trouble with the prescription opiates
are switching over to heroin, and
they get more for their buck, so to
speak,” Bunt said. In his experience, he added, much of the heroin
available today is laced with other
additives, like additional painkillers — making it more dangerous.
“Once you inject the heroin that’s
available today, you’re at very high
risk for fatal overdose,” he said.
For decades, opioid painkillers, like oxycodone, hydrocodone
and morphine, had been used successfully to treat conditions like
intense pain at the end of life for
HUFFINGTON
03.09.14
cancer patients and acute pain after an injury like a broken bone.
But everything changed when
OxyContin — and the marketing
campaign that came with it —
started in the 1990s, experts say.
The drug, developed by Purdue
Pharma, had a time-release mech-
“It was a feeling that I don’t
think anyone should experience.
Because once you experience
it, you want to experience it over
and over again.”
anism that spaced out its effects
over a longer period of time.
In dozens of seminars in ritzy
hotel conference rooms across
North America, the company
sold doctors on the idea that the
time-release function made OxyContin perfect for a population of
patients who were suffering from
chronic pain. Representatives also
argued that the drug’s spaced-out
effects made it less likely that patients would get addicted — which
was the main factor deterring
many physicians from prescribing
opioids for chronic pain.
“This campaign focused on convincing doctors that they shouldn’t