The opioid crisis is becoming a worldwide epidemic crossing all lines of race, age and class, medical experts said at a forum on the growing problem of opioid abuse last week at Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center.
On Friday, the McComb NAACP Youth Council hosted Dr. William McDade, an anesthesiologist with Ochsner Health Systems, in a forum about opioids.
“There’s a cause for this,” NAACP youth council director Mamie Kettle said. “There’s not enough known about it in Pike County and it’s a silent killer for a lot of people.”
Kettle said she approached Southwest Mississippi Regional Medical Center CEO Norman Price about sponsoring a forum on opioids and he told her that the hospital was on board.
“We were one of the first three hospitals to sue the pharmaceutical companies,” Price said. The opioid epidemic “has cost us as a hospital and our law enforcement. Now the whole country is on board but our hospital in McComb will be one of the original plaintiffs and it will help benefit our community.”
He said the opioid epidemic has been like letting a “genie out of the bottle.”
“We need pain medicine, but we don’t need it abused,” Price said.
McDade said doctors were once afraid to give their patients opioid-based painkillers, and they were in turn accused of undertreating their patients.
He said African-Americans were grossly undertreated by doctors.
“Doctors were told they weren’t caring for patients properly because they weren’t treating their pain,” he said.
Then medical journals opined that doctors could liberally prescribe opioids. McDade said that opened the door for their use.
“We began to assess pain on a linear scale,” he said.
In the 1990s, OxyContin, a powerful time-released painkiller, was created. McDade said patients who became addicted to the drug figured out the pills could be crushed for a stronger effect.
McDade said the company that makes OxyContin was sued in 2004 for cause of excess deaths and the problems it caused for law enforcement.
He said when pharmaceutical companies began to figure out that the drug can be crushed, “they made it so that it was harder to crush the pills.”
But as opioids became more difficult to abuse, that led to a spike in heroin use and addiction.
“Drug users needed a drug that provided the same high as OxyContin,” he said, noting that withdrawals of opioids, can bring on a sickness similar to heroin withdrawal, incentivizing addicts to get their fix. McDade said users have to keep feeding their addiction and they look for the next big high, which led many to turn to black tar heroin.
“Now, it’s not just hippies, junkies or blacks using drugs; it’s your neighbor’s kid next to you,” he said.
He said 12-year-old white girls were starting to show up in emergency rooms due to heroin overdoses.
He said overdoses in young teens began to skyrocket. White overdoses doubled but young black men between the ages of 15-25 tripled.
McDade said more people began to realize that opioids were a problem and started trying to combat it.
He said pharmaceutical companies are no longer marketing opioids to physicians.
The American Medical Association created a opioid taskforce to help combat the problem.
McDade said Narcan, an antagonist to opioids was widely distributed to law enforcement to help prevent fatal overdoses.
“We began to see some improvement,” he said. “Doctors now don’t prescribe more than needed and it’s taken in intervals.”
