Social change on Prescription Drug Abuse

Drug abuse has always been a major concern in society. Heroine and prescription drug abuse is on the rise and it is impacting children in a negative way. There are many stories on the news where parents are overdosing and dying in front of their children. It is even being considered for children to be trained on giving a reversal agent to their parents when they have an overdose. I understand that this helps save the parent from an overdose but it’s sad to see that type of responsibility on a child. Everyone deserves a chance at life and all first responders should be trained on the use of the reversal agent. I just think this puts a lot on a child and can cause psychological difficulties. What if the parent doesn’t learn from this and they continue to overdose? How many times should a child be subjected to administering the reversal agent.

CVS Health is trying to assist with making the reversal agent known as naloxone available without a prescription. Salazar (2016) reported that the vice president of CVS Health pharmacy and professional practices wants to expand access to this drug to save lives. As of now, CVS Health has relationships with physicians in 36 states which allows the ability to dispense naloxone to patients without a prescription. CVS has also partnered with Adapt Pharma for a nasal spray of naloxone which is known as Narcan Nasal Spray (Salazar, 2016). If this is the case, then it does not bother me as much if children are administering the drug in the form of a nasal spray as it would if it were an injection. The price of Narcan is $35.00 without insurance. It is beneficial to the public for it to be affordable and this can reduce the number of deaths from overdoses significantly.

In terms of prescription medications, physicians should be held accountable for over medicating a patient. In 2014, 19,000 deaths resulted from abusing prescription opioid pain relievers (Bao et al., 2016). To solve this problem, prescription drug monitoring programs have been used to reduce the number of opioids that are prescribed by physicians. Bao et al (2016) reported that people who abuse prescription drugs use a tactic which is known as doctor shopping. Having prescription drug monitoring programs identify these patterns and they also keep a track of how often physicians are prescribing these medications. Because of this program, there has been a 30% reduction rate of prescribing of schedule II opioids (Bao et al., 2016).

 

References

Bao, Y., Pan, Y., Taylor, A., Radakrishnan, S., Luo, F., Pincus, H. A., & Schackman, B. R. (2016). Prescription drug monitoring programs are associated with sustained reductions in opioid prescribing by physicians. Health Affairs (Project Hope), 35(6), 1045-1051. doi:10.1377/hlthaff.2015.1673

Salazar, D. (2016). Naloxone access, community efforts work to curb opioid abuse. New York: Lebhar-Friedman, Inc.

1 comment

  1. Good article! I’ve never really had reason to look into this, so this was largely pretty new information for me.

    I agree wholeheartedly about children having to administer an injection. Even if they were willing to, there’s so much potential for that to go awry.

    Personally, I’m not too thrilled with all of the parent-overdosing-in-front-of-child stories we’re seeing on the news or on social media. It has been happening for a while, but has only recently begun to get media attention – and I feel like it’s the wrong kind. As it is, these reports and videos cater to the same sort of morbid fascination that has people slowing down on the highway to get a good look at a car wreck, and there’s no real evidence so far that it’s doing anything to deter overdosing.

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