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Popping pain pills: Opiate addiction has become bigger problem than heroin, cocaine in the past
Pain pill addicts are more likely to be older white Americans who receive a prescription from a doctor, a national expert said Friday.
The nation's opiate epidemic is far worse than the heroin and cocaine epidemics combined from the 1970s and 80s, said Dr. Andrey Kolodny, chief medical officer with the Phoenix House Foundation, a national drug treatment organization, at a Drug Free Collier event.
"To say this epidemic is disproportionately white is an understatement," he said. "It is striking how white this epidemic is."
His theory is that physicians see someone who is white as less likely to be addicted and less likely to sell their pills on the street.
Speaking to 100 addiction and medical leaders, law enforcement personnel and local residents whose lives have been impacted by opiate addiction, Kolodny shared how the pharmaceutical industry fueled the nation's opiate addiction starting in 1996.
The event at Hodges University in North Naples was designed to educate the public and provide training to professionals to help combat heroin and opiate addiction.
The drug companies wanted pain pills prescribed for common problems, rather than the limited market of terminal patients, and the pharmaceutical companies at the time convinced medical professionals that addiction is rare and different from physical dependence, he said.
Even the perfect pain patient who uses a prescription correctly and stops faces symptoms from physical dependence that can last for months, like insomnia, and it becomes easier to take another pill to relieve the symptoms, he said.
"We don't have a bright line between physical dependence and addiction," he said.
Today, 10 to 12 million Americans take pain pills for chronic pain, he said.
Collier County officials talked about the rise in heroin use after Florida's crackdown on "pill mills" in 2010.
There still are a lot of pills on the street but the drug cartel has pumped more into heroin, which is cheaper and less fearful to young people because it can be snorted, said Morgan Rogers, a detective with the Collier County Sheriff's Office.
"One dose of heroin goes for $20," he said. In contrast, one oxycodone pill goes for $30.
There were 45 overdose deaths in Collier County from January through June in 2015, the latest data available, according to the Florida Medical Examiner's mid-year report for 2015.
Collier County's emergency medical responders have no way of knowing what mix of pills, alcohol and other drugs are involved in an overdose call, said Capt. Anthony Maro, with the county's EMS.
The use of Narcon, a drug to reverse an overdose, has risen from being used 98 times in 2013 and will be used a projected 285 times by the end of this year, Maro said.
"It's a lot of patients," he said. "It is alarming."
Brenda Iliff, executive director of Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Naples, said the center has different treatment approaches for different age groups. She said older people with opiate addiction can do well in outpatient care after they have been detoxed.
What Hazelden is seeing, and did not expect, are older people who have relapsed with a pain pill addiction after years or decades of recovery, she said.
