The Food and Drug Administration, For the first time ever, has told a drug company to pull a painkiller off the market because it has such a high potential for abuse. Opana ER, an extended release form of the opioid drug oxymorphone made by the drug company Endo, was being crushed up and injected by people seeking to abuse it.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says opioid overdoses have hit record highs, killing more than 47,000 people in 2014 more than the 32,000 who died in road accidents.
The CDC is embroiled in a big fight over how to do this. It proposed new draft guidelines include using every other possible approach to managing pain before giving someone an opioid such as fentanyl or oxycontin to control pain.
This wouldn’t apply to terminally ill cancer patients and the proposed guidelines would be voluntary. But the pushback has been hard from patients, doctors and the drug industry, as well as groups such as the U.S. Pain Foundation and the American Academy of Pain Management.
A team at Stanford University reported that primary care physicians, not pain specialists, are by far the biggest prescribers of opioid drugs. They said sales of prescription opioids rose by 300 percent since 1999.
Not a good solution to the patients, the doctors, the drug abusers or for healthcare in general.
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