What percentage of Americans have opiates they aren’t using in their house? Go ahead, take a guess.
I’ll tell you what I would have said if I was presented with that hypothetical. Somewhere around 15% would be my guess.
What about yours? Twenty? Thirty?
Try 60%. A new study found that 60% of Americans have opiates just laying around the house.
That’s… that’s fucking crazy. Via The Washington Post:
Nearly 60 percent of Americans have leftover narcotics in their homes, and 20 percent have shared those with another person, according to a survey published Monday that provides more evidence of how opiates find their way into the hands of people other than patients with doctors’ prescriptions.
The survey of 1,032 people, which was published online in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, shows that nearly three-quarters said they provided the opiates to someone else to help that individual manage pain. Another 17 percent said they did it because the other person could not afford medication or didn’t have insurance.
If you’re wondering if American doctors are overprescribing opiates, well, I think you have your answer.
Worse, people are leaving them lying them around, where anyone can get them.
More troubling is that just 21 percent of the people surveyed said they kept their painkillers in a place that locks or latches — with less than 9 percent saying their medication was in a location that could be locked.
As you know, America is currently in the throes of an opioid epidemic, and people’s dependence on and increased tolerance to these drugs are leading to overdoses.
Many authorities believe that over-prescribing of painkillers by physicians, coupled with illegal diversion and sharing of narcotics, have helped fuel the nation’s prescription-drug epidemic. Nearly 165,000 people have died of overdoses from prescription-opioid medications such as oxycodone, hydrocodone and morphine since 2000.
Now, I love a good painkiller and some booze every now and then, but good fucking lord. Sixty percent of Americans? That is geniunely fucking insane.
Maybe we should try prescribing them less.
[Via The Washington Post]