Those stats are not really that useful. For example, CII narcos require monthly written refills, so for patients with legitimate chronic pain you are looking at 12 scripts per year. That is per med type and a high percentage of those people are on two types - one extended release and one immediate release for breakthrough pain. So just 1 terminal patient would have 24 scripts per year or more. Those stats did not provide this breakdown so interpretation is somewhat ambiguous.
And is that a big change over where we were
before we started hosing down every person with a stiff neck with opiate pain meds? Or have those prescribing standards been in place for a long time and the only change is that they are being used a lot more.
The use of opioid pain medications tripled, in sheer number of doses, in about a 20 year period. From the Frontline piece I cited earlier:
Opioid prescriptions tripled over 20 years
One factor behind the surge in heroin and opioid use was the dramatic spike in the use of prescription painkillers.
In 1991, doctors wrote 76 million prescriptions. By 2011, that number had nearly tripled, to 219 million, according to
a report from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. This rise was made all the more dangerous when drug cartels began flooding the United States with heroin, which was cheaper, more potent, and often easier to acquire than prescription pain meds. As the National Institute on Drug Abuse noted:
Mexican heroin production increased from an estimated 8 metric tons in 2005 to 50 metric tons in 2009 — more than a six-fold increase in just four years. Domination of the U.S. market by Mexican and Colombian heroin sources, along with technology transfer between these suppliers, has increased the availability of easily injectable, white powder heroin. In a recent survey of patients receiving treatment for opioid abuse, accessibility was one of the main factors identified in the decision to start using heroin.
As both heroin and prescription opioids became more common, so too did overdoses.
