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The Problems With Prescription Drug Addiction
Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - by Bradley County Sheriff Eric Watson
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In Tennessee today, we have a major problem with prescription drug addiction, particularly when powerful opioid pain relievers are concerned.

For the first time in 2012, Tennesseans abused prescription opioid drugs more than alcohol. Our young people ages 18-25 abuse prescription opioids at a 30 percent higher rate than the national average. In just five years from 2005 to 2010, our emergency rooms saw a 40 percent increase in visits for prescription drug poisoning and overdose.

These statistics are alarming, but the real world implications are worse. Our law enforcement officials see firsthand the havoc that addiction can wreak on the lives of addicts, their friends, family, and even their employers and their community.

The impact of prescription drug addiction usually reaches far beyond the addict and their loved ones, yet more than 70 percent of those who abuse prescription drugs say they got them from family members or friends.

This behavior is dangerous. Prescription drug abuse can often lead to addiction, lost workplace productivity, emergency room visits, health care and treatment costs, newborns with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, children in state custody, people incarcerated for drug-related crimes, and overdose deaths.

All the while, prescription opioids are important pain therapies for thousands of patients across the state—friends and family members who have a legitimate medical need for the medication.

Inhibiting access to these drugs is not the solution. Instead, we must recognize that part of our problem begins at home in our medicine cabinets and take the smart steps we can to reduce the likelihood that prescription drugs will be abused in the first place.

New “abuse deterrent” drug formulations approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration offer great promise because they are expected to deter certain particularly dangerous kinds of abuse.

With chemical and physical properties to help prevent the pill from being manipulated, abuse-deterrent drugs are more difficult to break down or crush for snorting or injecting. As a result, abuse deterrent medications are much less desirable to those who seek a quick and potent high-- and much less likely to be abused.

In this way, abuse deterrent opioid drugs offer great promise in staving off prescription drug abuse and addiction, and helping to reduce associated criminal activity in our communities.

While these reformulated drugs are by no means the silver bullet in the fight against medicine abuse, they will contribute a great deal towards lowering the medical, criminal justice, and human life costs of a statewide prescription drug addiction epidemic like the one we have now.

If by prescribing a new formulation of prescription opioids, we might see fewer prescription drug arrests, drug poisoning emergency room visits, addicted babies born, children ripped away from addict parents, or overdose deaths– I say “sign us up.”

Because abuse deterrent drugs are expected to result in such a meaningful reduction of abuse, we should do what it takes to incorporate the use of abuse deterrent medications in our fight against prescription drug abuse.

Our elected officials will have to make the final call, but from a law enforcement perspective, the support that abuse deterrent drugs can offer in helping to stop our prescription drug abuse problem at the source would be welcomed and appreciated.





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