NBC Nightly News (7/6) reported, “As this country battles the opioid drug crisis, the CDC reported today that far too many people are still being prescribed those highly addictive ‘pain medications’ and for too long. The warning came despite the fact that the number of prescriptions was down actually over a five-year period.”

The Washington Post (7/6) reports that the number of prescriptions written for opioid pain medications “declined between 2012 and 2015,” according to data by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

According to the Post, the data introduce “a glimmer of progress in efforts to quell the worst drug epidemic in US history.”

According to Dr. Anne Schuchat of the CDC, “It looks a little bit better, but you really have to put that in context. We’re still seeing too many people get too much for too long.” Dr. Schuchat said the reduction should be considered “prevention” of addiction, because “the fewer we get started, the fewer we get addicted to opioids.”

The New York Times (7/6,) reports that the CDC analysis found that the prescribing rate “fell by 18 percent between 2010 and 2015, though it increased in 23 percent of counties,” and is still “three times as high as in 1999, when the nation’s problem with opioid addiction was just getting started.” The analysis found “tremendous regional variation” in the prescription of opioids.

STAT (7/6, Joseph) reports that the analysis “found that every part of the country had counties that had much higher prescribing rates than others, which officials said was a sign that clinicians did not have standards to use or disregarded them when prescribing opioids for pain.”

Blogfinger Medical Report:  Paul Goldfinger MD

I know a doctor who went to jail because of misprescribing opioids for money. Besides opioids, drugs like Xanax, which are very addictive, also get abused.

Most doctors do not give too much pain killers.  But too many patients are prescribed opioids like Oxycontin when their pain could be treated with lesser drugs such as anti-inflammatory agents.  The worse kind of pain is from cancer, and it is often hard for a physician to refuse those drugs for advanced cancer patients.  While authorities try to reduce prescription opioids, doctors must use their best judgement to make sure that worthy patients get what they need.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be addicted to these drugs, and obviously not all the victims began with prescription dugs because you can buy such agents made in labs by cartels.*

Note that most addicts are found in the suburbs rather than the big cities.  So don’t think it can’t happen in your quaint, cozy hometowns.

And the new marijuana agents on the market are quite powerful and  addictive despite what you might hear from pot advocates.

As for the counties with high prescribing rates, Monmouth and Ocean Counties have high overdose death rates, but most of those are due to the prescription drug Fentanyl being *made in cartel labs. That’s the drug that killed Prince.

Learn more by clicking on the links above, from the American Medical Association. Local and Federal agencies are working in our backyard to combat this situation.