A Flood of Opioids, a Rising Tide of Deaths

Faced with an epidemic of drug abuse and overdose deaths involving prescription opioid pain relievers, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to require opioid makers to provide training for physicians and patient-education materials on the appropriate prescribing and use of extended-release and long-acting versions of these drugs. But since July, FDA officials have been scrambling to revise their proposed Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS), after an advisory panel (the agency's Anesthetic and Life Support Drugs Advisory Committee and Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee) voted 25 to 10 against the FDA's plan, saying it didn't go far enough. Advisors urged that training in appropriate use of opioids be made mandatory for all physicians who prescribe them.

In the eyes of many patients, these opioids “are essentially legal heroin,” advisory committee member Lewis Nelson of New York University School of Medicine commented during the panel's discussion. “We need to think about how we would construct a REMS if we were going to be marketing heroin.” With more than a million prescribers of controlled substances registered with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and about 4 million U.S. patients receiving long-acting or extended-release opioids each year, the FDA's opioid REMS will affect far more people than any existing REMS for high-risk medications. Any discussion of restricting the use of pain medicines provokes emotional debate, with some advocates warning that people in chronic pain may be undertreated or stigmatized and others arguing that access to powerful painkillers leads to thousands of deaths each year.

There is ample evidence that action is needed. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), deaths from unintentional drug overdoses in the United States have been rising steeply since the early 1990s and are the second-leading cause of accidental death, with 27,658 such deaths recorded in 2007. That increase has been propelled by a rising number of overdoses of opioids (synthetic versions of opium), which caused 11,499 of the deaths in 2007 — more than heroin and cocaine combined (see line graph). Visits to emergency departments for opioid abuse more than doubled between 2004 and 2008,1 and admissions to substance-abuse treatment programs increased by 400% between 1998 and 2008, with prescription painkillers being the second most prevalent type of abused drug after marijuana.

with prescription painkillers being the second most prevalent type of abused drug after marijuana.

unfortunately ,it's a very important family ( natural , synthetic or semi synthetic ) that we need in surgery or other fields but the huge problem of addiction make it very suspicious

exactly, we don't have statistic informations about this type of addiction in our great arab world but I think we should expect more consciousness from patients.