Addiction and Compliance by Keith A Raymond*
in Developmentsin Anaesthetics & Pain Management
At
the end of my clinical hours here in Europe, I met with some patients
to discuss current events. They were completely unaware, and
even surprised by, the opiate problem in the United States. It certainly
is not a problem here in Austria, much less the rest of Europe.
In Portugal, where illicit drugs were decriminalized in 2001,
the drug overdose death rate was 3 per million in 2015. In the
UK during the same year, it was 45 opiate related deaths per million. For 2015, the NIH reported about 100 deaths per million
in the US from opioid overdose. This is one overdose death per
5914 opiate prescriptions written in that year. The numbers in the
US are worth reflection and appear suspect . This suggests most
of these deaths are due to diversion not prescription. To put these
numbers in perspective, the number of people that died with Alzheimer’s
disease in 2015 was 93,500 vs. opioid related deaths in the
same year of 35,000 in the USA.
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