Did you know that opiates now kill more people in American than car accidents? This is hard to swallow, isn't it? This includes morphine, fentanyl, oxycodone and hydrocodone and most people are getting them from their doctors. More people in America use prescription opioids than smoke cigarettes today. Obviously America is a country full of drug addicts.

The director of the CDC stated: "We know of no other medication routinely used for a nonfatal condition that kills patients so frequently." He even said that some patients can become addicted from a single course of these medications. At an annual cost of over $193 billion it sounds like opioid and heroin addiction has gotten quite out of hand. I'm sure as healthcare professionals most of you have witnessed this issue up close.

MTV has produced a film "Prescription for Change" that deals with this issue and includes an interview with President Obama. It also shares the history of this devastation starting in 1996 when Purdue Pharma, oxycontin manufacturer, put out 20,000 "educational programs" that encouraged long term use of these drugs to control pain in non-cancer patients. There were no studies supporting their long term use in non-fatal diagnoses. Purdue lied and convinced patients and doctors that this narcotic was safe and non-addictive.

There are143 opioid prescriptions written for every 100 people in Alabama, which has the highest rate of prescription of these drugs in the US. Doctors are over-prescribing these painkillers and there is an epidemic of addiction because of it. Most of the addicts in today's society got hooked after being sent home with one of these drugs after even a minor injury or illness. A recent study found that 1 out of every 550 patients on long term opioid therapy died within 2.5 years of their first prescription of opioid-related causes. Several studies found that use of these drugs even worsened pain over time and made the patient's functioning decrease.

Heroin use is increasing due to the cracking down on some of these prescription "pill-mills". When the addict can no longer get the prescription meds they need they will resort to street drugs. Heroin is the street equivalent of these prescription narcotics and heroin use in the US is up in the past several years. During one week in August of this year in Cincinnati 174 overdoses of heroin occurred and resulted in death.

Is drug addiction a crime or a disease? Well, thoughts are changing about this in our world today. Sad to say it takes the fact that this crisis is now affecting the rich as well as the poor, to make the news.

The Surgeon General of the US, Dr. Vivek Murthy, recently told NPR, "We now know from solid data that substance abuse disorders…affect the rich and the poor, all socioeconomic groups and ethnic groups. They affect people in urban areas and rural ones…For far too long people have thought about substance abuse disorders as a disease of choice, a character flat or a moral failing. We underestimated how exposure to addictive substances can lead to full blown addiction. Opioids are a good example. Now we understand that these disorders actually change the circuitry in your brain….That tells us that addicition is a chronic disease of the brain, and we need to treat it with the same urgency and compassion that we do with any other illness."

Doctors who prescribe and Big Pharma need to acknowledge these issues and take responsibility to help resolve this issue in America today.

Mary Crawford, HealthCare Employment Network