From Deseret News archives:
Dying to feel better
Pain medication overdose deaths have become a Utah epidemic
Rob Lake's autopsy found a combination of medications: Lortab, Xanax, Wellbutrin and an antibiotic. The Xanax was for a long-standing problem with anxiety, the Wellbutrin was for depression, and the antibiotic and the Lortab were for an abscessed tooth pulled a few days earlier.
"Non-illicit drug poisoning death" is the way his passing will find its way into Utah's statistics one more number to add to the state's growing list of deaths caused by prescription pain medications.
It only takes a glance at the Utah Department of Health's graphs of drug deaths to see what's happening: While suicides from prescription medications have been pretty much steady in the past 15 years, the line representing "unintentional or undetermined" prescription drug deaths has been going straight uphill since 1999. The number of those deaths also eclipses deaths from illicit street drugs.
"It's an epidemic. And each death is a little island," Grey says. Although the increases have alarmed health experts, "the community is not making the connection."
While some of these deaths occurred in healthy young people just looking for a high, victims increasingly are what Grey describes as middle-aged adults with a history of chronic pain. They are often patients under a doctor's care with a legal prescription for drugs that end up killing them. They're divided nearly evenly between men and women, dotted across Utah's smallest towns and biggest cities. Often the victims are overweight.
The drugs that kill them include pain relief staples such as hydrocodone, fentanyl and oxycodone. And, increasingly, methadone. For both 2004 and 2005, says a state epidemiologist, Christy Porucznik, Ph.D., methadone was the one drug most often associated with a fatal overdose.
"Patients do not appreciate the power and potential lethality of these drugs," says local pain management physician Dr. Lynn Webster. "Too often patients use pain medication as if it is aspirin or ibuprofen if one pill helps a little, then two must help a lot."
Educating the public
Recent comments
I'm very surprised the # of deaths isn't even higher than this....
Shelly | May 15, 2009 at 8:19 p.m.
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