New Orleans: Losing the Fight Against Fentanyl
It’s National Recovery Month, and according to the Orleans Parish Coroner’s 2018 report, deaths caused by the lethal synthetic opioid have doubled in recent years.
It’s National Recovery Month, and according to the Orleans Parish Coroner’s 2018 report, deaths caused by the lethal synthetic opioid have doubled in recent years.
A recently released report suggests that there will be an increased need for recovery services in the years ahead.
Over the past 15 years communities have been affected, families destroyed, and thousands of individuals have died during the ongoing opioid epidemic. In only six years, statistics show that the rate of overdose deaths doubled from 21,089 in 2010 to 42,249 in 2016.
A U.S. Government-sponsored task force this week released a report recommending that primary care physicians routinely screen their patients for illicit drug use. The recommendation is similar to the task force’s now-followed recommendation that primary care physicians routinely query their patients about drinking and smoking habits.
To begin to calculate the value of treatment for substance abuse, it is helpful to first understand the costs related to substance abuse. Substance abuse impact is expensive, not just to the person using the substance, but to their family, workplace and society.
Families often struggle to get a loved one into treatment for an alcohol or drug addiction. It is not easy to start a conversation about addiction, and many times the person struggling with addiction responds with excuses, anger, denial or minimization. A conversation can easily escalate to an argument where nothing is accomplished.
Veterans aren’t invincible. Hollywood does a fantastic job of making military members seem invincible. But the fact is they’re flesh and blood like the rest of us, and when troops …
What is 50 times more potent than heroin? What is 100 times more powerful than morphine? Same answer to both questions, Fentanyl. Fentanyl is a strong synthetic drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration to be medically used for pain relief and as an anesthetic.
WalletHub recently delved into the substance abuse problem with a major research article, examining all 50 states and the District of Columbia. They found that while some states ranked much higher with substance abuse issues than others, those ratings could change as the data is examined in different ways.
Methamphetamine never received the notoriety or news attention that opioids did – at least not until recently. Now headlines from medical journals, government agencies, popular magazines to radio stations are screaming warnings about the dangers and increases in methamphetamine use.