Every day, national and local headlines are filled with stories of families grappling with the effects of the opioid epidemic and the 115 lives it claims on a daily basis. Too many families live in fear that their child will be the next statistic. All the while, policy makers at the federal, state and local levels grasp for innovative ways to address the problem in a meaningful way.
Heroin and the misuse of prescription opioids killed more than 42,000 people in 2016, more than any other year on record. In that same year, 11.7 billion opioid pills were prescribed in the United States, which is enough for every man, woman and child to have 36 pills each.
[See: 4 Opioid Drugs Parents Should Have on Their Radar.]
At the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, we have long been focused on access to treatment and are also keenly aware that there are opportunities to stop addiction before it starts by targeting the key drivers of overprescribing. In the surgical setting, the onset of many people’s misuse, 9 in 10 patients are exposed to opioids to manage their pain. Those given a prescription receive an average of 85 pills. In 2016, 3.3 billion pills prescribed after surgery went unused.
Too often, those unused or excess pills are neither safely stored nor disposed of, leaving a dangerous accumulation of opioids available for misuse. Perhaps unsurprisingly, two-thirds of teens and young adults who report abuse of prescription opioids report getting them from friends, family and acquaintances.
In order to protect families, it is imperative to take action to curb the rate of overprescribing. It’s equally important to provide options for patients in recovery from opioid use disorders who cannot use prescription opioids without fear of relapse. While limiting the number of pills that can be prescribed is an important step, it isn’t a silver bullet. We must also encourage federal policymakers to seek practical measures to prevent patients from encountering opioids in the first place given the recent evidence on increased risk for future opioid dependence following even several days of regular opioid use It’s time to look to non-opioid pain management options that effectively manage pain without the severe secondary consequences associated with prescribing opioids.
[See: 6 Nonopioid Ways to Ease Postoperative Pain.]
While the development and use of non-opioid alternatives for pain has been a priority of National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins and was offered as a recommendation in the President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis report, the concept is not yet making its way to patients. There are significant obstacles to changing the culture of prescribing and making these alternatives available to patients, including the reimbursement guidelines for these medications. For example, barriers in current federal reimbursement law present significant challenges to surgical patients in accessing some non-opioid therapies. Medicare does not provide adequate reimbursement for non-addictive opioid alternatives used during and after surgery. As a result, many hospitals and health systems are unable to make these therapies available, leaving many patients and providers frustrated, and others entirely unaware that such therapies exist.
Barriers like this one must be eliminated if we are to treat the opioid crisis as a public health emergency. Each federal agency must examine the incentives — and disincentives — within their purview to reducing the number of pills prescribed and making non-opioid alternatives available, especially to patients in recovery from addiction.
[Read: Millennials Hit Hard by Opioids.]
This epidemic demands leadership. We cannot afford to let another day go by without making sure that parents and families have access to non-addictive pain management approaches. We stand ready to work with Congress and the Administration to make these needed changes. Together, we can make a difference — and we can save lives in the process.
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We Must Stop Opioid Overprescribing — Now originally appeared on usnews.com
