Opioid abuse continues.
(Mirror Daily, United States) – The concern of opioid abuse is far from being over as the new regulations have proved to be quite ineffective in dealing with this problem.
It is already known that many people throughout the United States are addicted to opioids, and heroin is one of them. Until now, experts believed that opioid treatment should be only available on prescription. They thought that by doing this, they will solve the problem.
However, the issue on the streets remains as many drug dealers fool consumers by selling them powerful opioid drugs instead of heroin. Worse, it has been recently discovered that some opioids are much stronger and more addictive than heroin. In other words, they can quickly lead to an overdose.
There are many initiatives throughout the United States that try to tackle this problem. One of them is the new drug, naloxone, which is thought to deal with the side-effects of the opioid abuse. For instance, if a victim collapses from an overdose, this drug can be sprayed into the victim’s nostrils to remove the effect of the overdose.
However, even this drug is still not enough to deal with this issue. In addition to this, customers must follow the instructions correctly in order to use naloxone efficiently. Unfortunately, disabled people on Medicare were the least helped by the new laws.
After issuing 81 laws regarding the prescription of opioids, the problem is still not solved, according to a team of scientists from the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law.
According to Jill Horwitz, Ph.D., JD., these laws have been highly ineffective on disabled Medicare beneficiaries. The data was collected based on a study that included 2.2 million participants between ages of 21 to 64 years old.
Unfortunately, it was established that these beneficiaries had a higher rate of complicated medical conditions, poverty, and opioid use than the rest of the United States population. According to Professor Ellen Meara, Ph.D. and lead author from the Dartmouth Institute, these laws were not able to tackle the opioid epidemic regarding these patients.
The new laws were released between 2006 and 2012. However, other laws issued starting from 2012 proved to have more success in dealing with the opioid abuse throughout the United States. Hopefully, educating people will be another countermeasure that will prevent this epidemic from spreading further.
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