Answer Addiction

Tag: opioid use

  • Vaping Rates Double Among Teens, While Opioid Use Declines

    Vaping Rates Double Among Teens, While Opioid Use Declines

    Results from the 2018 Monitoring The Future survey show that teens have turned to vaping nicotine and marijuana and away from binge drinking and opioid use. 

    The percentage of teens who reported vaping nicotine nearly doubled this year, representing the largest increase in use of a substance since the national Monitoring the Future study began. 

    “To put the nicotine vaping increase in context, it is the largest out of more than one thousand reported year-to-year changes since 1975 for use of substances within the 30 days prior to the survey,” according to a press release from the University of Michigan, which conducts the annual survey of about 50,000 8th, 10th and 12th graders. 

    About 20% of high school seniors reported vaping nicotine in the past 30 days. In addition, more than a quarter of teens reported vaping “just flavoring,” but researchers believe these students may be confused or ill-informed about what they’re consuming, since many popular vaping devices don’t have nicotine-free options. Marijuana vaping also increased. 

    “Teens are clearly attracted to the marketable technology and flavorings seen in vaping devices; however, it is urgent that teens understand the possible effects of vaping on overall health; the development of the teen brain; and the potential for addiction,” Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse said. “Research tells us that teens who vape may be at risk for transitioning to regular cigarettes, so while we have celebrated our success in lowering their rates of tobacco use in recent years, we must continue aggressive educational efforts on all products containing nicotine.”

    Overall, 28.5% of high school seniors reported using nicotine of some variety in the past 30 days. Tobacco use was down slightly in 2018 but not a statistically significant amount. This shows that prevention efforts need to target teens who may see vaping as a safe alternative to smoking. 

    “Vaping is reversing hard-fought declines in the number of adolescents who use nicotine,” said Richard Miech, the lead author and investigator of the study. “These results suggest that vaping is leading youth into nicotine use and nicotine addiction, not away from it.”

    He said vaping is popular because it is easy to conceal. 

    “If we want to prevent youth from using drugs, including nicotine, vaping will warrant special attention in terms of policy, education campaigns, and prevention programs in the coming years,” Miech said.

    The survey found that binge drinking and use of opioids and tranquilizers decreased significantly, while use of other drugs, including meth, marijuana and molly remained stable. 

    “With illicit opioid use at generally the lowest in the history of the survey, it is possible that being in high school offers a protective effect against opioid misuse and addiction,” Volkow said. “We will be focusing much of our new prevention research on the period of time when teens transition out of school into the adult world and become exposed to the dangerous use of these drugs.” 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Opioid Crisis In The 1800s Shares Similar Roots With Today's Epidemic

    Opioid Crisis In The 1800s Shares Similar Roots With Today's Epidemic

    Just as modern doctors began using opioids to treat a variety of pain, doctors more than 100 years ago used morphine in the same way, exposing more people to the drug. 

    Aggressive advertising touting the benefits of medications, quick fixes offered by new-found wonder drugs and doctors who didn’t realize the dangers of the medications they were prescribing sound a lot like all the pieces that led to today’s opioid epidemic. However, these are a few of the causes of opioid addiction that spiked in the United States in the late 1800s, according to a report in Smithsonian.

    At the time morphine was a new medication and doctors and patients were equally enamored with it. The drug became an ingredient in everything from teething serums to constipation cures, and by 1889, Boston physician James Adams estimated that about 150,000 Americans were “medical addicts,” addicted to prescription drugs rather than opium that could be smoked. 

    Just as modern doctors began using opioids to treat all types of pain, doctors more than 100 years ago used morphine to treat a variety of ailments, exposing more people to the drug. 

    Morphine became “a magic wand [doctors] could wave to make painful symptoms temporarily go away,” said David Courtwright, a historian of drug use and policy at the University of North Florida and author of the book Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America. “It’s clear that that was the primary driver of the epidemic.”

    One reason for the popularity of morphine among doctors and patients was aggressive advertising. An ad for Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup for Teething Children, which contained morphine, declared the product was “The mother’s friend.”

    Most Victorians didn’t realize that the medications, which were not regulated at the time, contained potentially dangerous ingredients. When these medications were found to be effective treatment, they became increasingly popular. 

    “If buyers took a spoonful because they had, say, a case of the runs, the medicine probably worked,” Courtwright said. 

    Eventually, doctors began to realize that the heavy use of medications containing opioids was unhealthy and leading to addiction. 

    “By 1900, doctors had been thoroughly warned and younger, more recently trained doctors were creating fewer addicts than those trained in the mid-nineteenth century,” Courtwright wrote in a 2015 paper for The New England Journal of Medicine.

    Government regulation also played a part and regulating the crisis, Courtwright wrote. Medical experts, led by Adams, began pressuring their colleagues to move away from opioids, and states began to regulate narcotic use. This led to a sharp reduction in opioid prescriptions.

    For example, in 1888, 14.5% of prescriptions filled in Boston drugstores contained opiates, but by 1908, only 3.6% of prescriptions filled in California contained the drugs. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Link Between Trump Support And Opioid Use Revealed In New Study

    Link Between Trump Support And Opioid Use Revealed In New Study

    “When we look at the two maps, there was a clear overlap between counties that had high opioid use … and the vote for Donald Trump,” said the study’s author.

    There may be a geographic connection between those who supported Trump in the 2016 election and prescriptions for opioids, according to a new study published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open. 

    James S. Goodwin, chair of geriatrics at the University of Texas Medical Branch and the study’s lead author, along with other researchers, examined data from numerous sources which included the Census Bureau and the 2016 election, as well as data from Medicare Part D, a program for prescription drugs that helps those with disabilities and the elderly.

    “When we look at the two maps, there was a clear overlap between counties that had high opioid use… and the vote for Donald Trump,” Goodwin told NPR. “There were blogs from various people saying there was this overlap. But we had national data.”

    In order to estimate the amount of opioid use by county, Goodwin and his team utilized the number of Medicare Part D enrollees who had three months or more worth of opioid prescriptions. According to Goodwin, it was harder to estimate the amount of illegal opioid use, though prescription opioid use is strongly correlated with it.

    “There are very inexact ways of measuring illegal opioid use,” Goodwin told NPR. “All we can really measure with precision is legal opioid use.”

    In the research process, the team looked at a number of factors to determine how a county’s rate of chronic opioid prescriptions was influenced. They found that in the 2016 election, Trump support was closely tied to opioid prescriptions. In counties with higher-than-average numbers of chronic opioid prescriptions, 60% of those who voted did so for Trump whereas in counties with lower-than-average prescriptions, only 39% voted for him. 

    NPR also states that some of the correlation could have to do with social and economic factors, as many rural counties with struggling economies voted for Trump, and those are the areas where opioid use is common. 

    “As a result, opioid use and support for Trump might not be directly related, but rather two symptoms of the same problem—a lack of economic opportunity,” NPR noted. 

    Goodwin and his team also analyzed factors such as unemployment rate, median income, how rural areas were, education level and religious service attendance. They found that these factors account for about 66% of the connection between Trump voters and opioid use, but not the remaining percentage.

    “It very well may be that if you’re in a county that is dissolving because of opioids, you’re looking around and you’re seeing ruin. That can lead to a sense of despair,” Goodwin told NPR. “You want something different. You want radical change.”

    For some areas hit hard by the opioid crisis, NPR states, the Trump presidency may have seemed like a solution. 

    While the study shows a likely link, it isn’t definitive and has shortcomings, Goodwin states. 

    “We were not implying causality, that the Trump vote caused opioids or that opioids caused the Trump vote,” he cautions. “We’re talking about associations.”

    View the original article at thefix.com