How Dangerous are Opioids for Pain Management?

 by Henry Hayter

(image: Dan Meyers)

In 2016 there were over 40,000 deaths from prescribed opioids in the US. This begs the question as to why they are ever prescribed to patients seeing as - statistically speaking - someone is 5x more likely to die of opioid misuse than dying of HIV and subsequently AIDS.

Of course statistics don’t tell the whole truth ; there were over 150 million prescriptions detailing the use of opioids in the year 2017 prescribed to patients in the US whilst there were 1 million recorded cases of persons living with HIV in 2017 US. Therefore if there were equal numbers of opioid prescriptions to HIV cases then HIV and AIDS would be 30x more lethal than opioids.

Truthfully speaking prescribed opioids aren’t what kill , it’s the path that they set the recipient on to. In the US medication is far more expensive than here in the UK. In the US it costs approximately $6 for 1 oxycodone pill - oxycodone ,or oxycontin as branded, is  a common opioid used for pain management - whilst a month long prescription in the UK will cost only £12 - and furthermore the cost in the UK varies depending on income and age. As such it is easy to see why an addictive pain killer that costs $6 for 1 pill can easily ruin someone's livelihood. Instead of prescribed drugs being lethal it is the illegally obtained alternatives such as heroin that increase the numbers of deaths from opioid prescriptions up into the 10s of 1000s. The illegally obtained alternatives are often far lower quality than the drugs prescribed by professionals and can be laced with other solutions such as rat poison.  It is this unreliability and low quality that kills people, not the professionally made drug - however, it cannot be denied that the addictiveness of all opioids plays a factor in the deaths of those that are prescribed them.

It is my belief that if the price of these drugs were to decrease in the US to the price used in  England then many people would avoid the financial ruin that is often associated with drug addiction and avoid the early death that it can lead to ;  people would be far less likely to turn to illegal alternatives such as heroin - the prescribed drug would be equal in price or cheaper as well as being far safer.