The picture says it all. I just worked 4 days in the emergency department starting Wednesday and kept a count of my patients; 1/4 of my patients were heroin overdoses or someone wanting detox. Two more were patients with infective endocarditis from IV drug abuse; historically IÂ’d see a couple of cases PER FUCKING YEAR. This week is not an outlier as NC EMS agencies have dispensed 20,000 doses of Narcan this year which doesnÂ’t count the many more doses dispensed by police and fire departments. One municipality in OH literally added a refrigerated container box car unit to its morgue to keep up with the volume of bodies. A local middle school is considering stocking Narcan after a near fatal overdose by a student last month.
This problem is the direct result of the medical community providing easy access to prescription narcotics for 20 years and not challenging bullshit statements like this:
1) “Patients with non-cancer related chronic pain can be safely managed on long-term opiates with negligible chance of abuse and addiction.”
2) “Pain is the 5th vital sign.”
3) “Many of patients do well on long-term opiates, so we should not be too draconian in our approach to physician who care for these patient.”
My favorite is the last one. My reply is, “Yeah, well SOME patients well with blood letting. Let me know when you can define ‘doing well’ or predict who it will be.”
All of that is self-serving bullshit used to justify a shitty approach to medicine that lines physician and Pharma pockets while resulting in 300,000 dead. In other words, thank you state medical boards, Joint Commission, and DHHS for doing a bang-up job with policing your own.
Looking beyond the deaths, we face a possibility of a lost generation to opiates. Many of the blue collar employers in my region estimate that 1/3 of their applicants fail the drug test.
Now, a word to those who want to “end the war on drugs.” You now have a little taste of what happens when we unleash low-cost, highly addictive drugs on the population. In other words, if you really want to know why you are sitting in a waiting room with chest pain or appendicitis (or if your ambulance never showed up), it’s because 25% of my beds are occupied by overdoses.