PERSUASIVE ESSAY

Why Opioids need to Stop

Persuasive Essay

Thomas Carroll

Who knew a little pill had such an impact on someone’s lifestyle. Jamie MacMahon a young, talented, strong kid, fought for control of his life. Opioids took control of him and his life. He was a person filled with happiness and energy, a good, fun soul to be around. Because of opioids, Jamie couldn’t have fun, Jamie couldn't smile, Jamie couldn’t breathe. Opioids took his life. Jamie was the brother I never had, he was my cousin. He was my best friend and my role model.

After a broken arm, he was put on a prescription of Hydrocodone, a prescribed drug made to heal pain. After his first prescription he couldn’t get off, he started to become quiet and almost sneaky like he was hiding something. Behind his family’s back, he was living a different life. He turned to heroin because he was so dependant on the drug that he needed more. For him, the easiest way to get his fix was heroin.

In order to maintain opioid outbursts there’s a lot of things the nation can and should do. Restraining prescription sizes of over the counter opioids would lower the rate of addictiveness and misuse of the painkillers. Though it would be harder to reduce the usage of opioids we need to limit the amount of Opioid production and doctors need to stop subscribing opioids for miniscule injuries so less people get their hands on them. Why are people dying of such a well known lethal drug? People are switching from prescription opioids to mainstream drugs like heroin and fentanyl, because they are cheaper and more accessible compared to the over the counter drugs.

Too many people are dying off of a doctor's recommendations. These doctors are prescribing people too high of doses and when their prescription runs out they become addicted. Eventually the patients have to keep going and getting more until their addiction becomes fatal.

“In 2010, there were reportedly as many as 2.4 million opioid abusers in this country, and the number of new abusers had increased by 225% between 1992 and 2000. Sixty percent of the opioids that are abused are obtained directly or indirectly through a physician's prescription. In many instances, doctors are fully aware that their patients are abusing these medications or diverting them to others for nonmedical use, but they prescribe them anyway. Why? Recent changes in medicine's philosophy of pain treatment, cultural trends in Americans' attitudes toward suffering, and financial disincentives for treating addiction have contributed to this problem” (Lembke). Millions of people have died because of these prescribed drugs. Most of these drugs are coming from physicians, Doctors are letting their patients die. “In the meantime, countless patients come to emergency departments and doctors' offices throughout the country every day reporting pain and receiving opioids despite known or suspected addiction. Health care providers have become de facto hostages of these patients, yet the ultimate victims are the patients themselves, who are not getting the treatment for addiction they need and deserve (Lembke). Through all of these deaths the doctors keeps giving these drugs out, they are feeding their patients addiction and death.

What is given to a patient to help heal shouldn’t be what is going to kill the patient. “A vast body of clinical evidence suggests that neuropathic pain is not opioid-resistant but only that reduced sensitivity to systemic opioids is observed in this condition, and an increase in their dose is necessary in order to obtain adequate analgesia” (Stein). The Doctors are setting up their patients for withdrawal, they know how addictive and hard it is to go through hell. Withdrawal from opioids is about as much pain as a person can possibly go through. Once the opioids are stripped from the body many effects can happen and all of them are painful, the symptoms involve cold sweats, vomiting, nausea, muscle twitches, and diarrhea. People believe they would rather die than go through withdrawal of Opioids, this alone should scare people. This quote explains the variety of addiction. Most people have different nervous systems and drugs affect them different ways. Which should be highly considered when doctors prescribe a lethal amount of prescription opioids, a prescribed drug shouldn’t be lethal in the first place.

Opioids became popular when the prescription drug companies starting to push their brand like big tobacco companies did. “In the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to prescription opioid pain relievers, and healthcare providers began to prescribe them at greater rates” (National Institute on Drug Abuse). Near the late nineties, drug companies started advertising their product in order to make a better income, like the tobacco companies. They lied to to the medical community risking millions of deaths. “The annual number of overdose deaths involving prescription and illicit opioids has nearly quadrupled since 2000, and this increase parallels marked growth in the quantity of opioid pain relievers being prescribed. In addition, more than two million people in the United States are addicted to prescription opioids and more than twelve million report having misused these medications in 2015” (Murthy). The lying from these companies risked many lives. While pushing their product these manufacturers were basically forcing their patients to get on the wrong path. They got people hooked and the patients kept coming back for their prescriptions. “Different strategies have been used to rule out effects on the central nervous system, such as the administration of compounds that do not cross the blood-brain barrier” (Stein). Prescription drugs shouldn’t be easy to get your hands on, and the way the companies are pushing their product like it is safe is plain wrong.

Due to the fact that these manufacturers are making the prescriptions so pricey, people are starting to get into cheaper and more lethal drugs. In order to satisfy their addiction and don’t have the income to purchase over the counter drugs people are transferring from prescription drugs to drugs like Heroin and other more lethal opioids. "Most people that I know don't use OxyContin to get high anymore," one opioid user said in the study. "They have moved on to heroin [because] it is easier to use, much cheaper and easily available” (Moghe). In some areas people can’t afford upwards of two hundred dollars. The second option is a drug that is easier to get, more accessible, and cheaper. “An estimated forty to sixty percent who misuse prescription opioids transition to heroin” (National Institute on Drug Abuse). Though these numbers are colossal, they are reality. People who just can’t afford their addiction are switching to heroin. “Roughly twenty-one to twenty-nine percent of patients prescribed opioids for chronic pain misuse them. Between eight and twelve percent develop an opioid use disorder. An estimated four to six percent who misuse prescription opioids transition to heroin. About eighty percent of people who use heroin first misused prescription opioids” (National Institute on Drug Abuse). This quote explains how much prescription drugs are a gateway to worse things. How unreal, how annoying, how frightening these statistics are. This should scare people to never take prescription drugs, let alone turn their addiction lethal.

Opioids should not control anyone’s life. What happened to my family, to me, and especially Jaime shouldn’t happen to your family and to you. Opioids are a very dangerous thing that shouldn’t be in anyone’s hands, not even to help numb pain. People shouldn’t be dying from the thing that is helping them get better.

Bibliography

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This article was helpful because it shows the transition into pain prescriptions to opioids, and eventually transitioning into harder drugs. It also explains the signs of being on opioids in a physical and mental way.

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This article wasn’t useful for numbers and statistics but it really helped me understand what the effects of these drugs are. The source was an informative piece on how opioids affect different people under different circumstances. This really helped me understand how malicious these drugs are.

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This source helped me a lot during my research process. It assessed the potential of misusing over the counter opioids.

Lembke, Anna. “Why Doctors Prescribe Opioids to Known Opioid Abusers | NEJM.” New

England Journal of Medicine, www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1208498.

This article is helpful because it explains the problems pregnant women and their opioid addiction. It also explains how their children are affected by their addiction, being raised with an addiction. And it explains the withdrawal systems, and is also very in depth.

Melemis, Steven. “Opioids - Opiates: Addiction, Withdrawal, Crisis, Recovery Facts.”

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This article is helpful because it shows the signs of opioid addiction and helps me understand how people got hooked. It helps answer a lot of simple questions that were needed to be answered.

Moghe, Sonia. “Opioids: From 'Wonder Drug' to Abuse Epidemic.” CNN, Cable News Network,

14 Oct. 2016, www.cnn.com/2016/05/12/health/opioid-addiction-history/index.html.

This article explains the come up of opioids and how it has affected our nation. This helped a lot in the research process because it helps to know the come up of the drug t understand how it became what it is.

Murthy, Vivek. “Ending the Opioid Epidemic - A Call to Action | NEJM.” New England Journal

of Medicine, 22 Dec. 2016, www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1612578.

This article is explaining the possible solutions to the opioid crisis. It was really interesting to see what people’s views are on this topic and what they think could stop it.

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www.drugabuse.gov/drugs-abuse/opioids/opioid-overdose-crisis.

This article is important to my paper because it shows how Opioids started and how addictive it is. It explains how organizations are helping the epidemic and fighting for the people addicted. This article is important to my research because it explains how many people are addicted and what will help them.

Stein, Christoph. “The Control of Pain in Peripheral Tissue by Opioids | NEJM.” New England

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This article was a more scientific source. Though it was confusing it was very informative on how Opioids affect the body and how it affects different people in different ways.

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This Article explains how Opioids work and the effects of using them. This Article is useful because it helps understand where the user gets the drug. It also explains where the problem aroused, how it began. This article explains how Opioid users seem different when they are on them, and the signs that the user is on. This article is important to me because it helps me understand the effects on the users and to show how dangerous the withdrawals.