The Dirty Secret Behind American Addiction to Painkillers
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When America saw the first signs of an opioid addiction epidemic in the mid 1990s, one major mystery began to fester. Pharmacology research has long suggested that drugs that take effect slowly and last for a long time are likely to be less addictive than those that hit fast and crash faster. In fact, that's at least part of why FDA officials felt like they were on safe ground when they approved
Oxycontin—the first long-acting form of the opioid oxycodone—in 1995.
But the explosion of addictions after that suggested there was a glaring problem with this perspective. Most Oxycontin addictions struck recreational drug users who snorted or injected it—which bypasses the time-release mechanism and makes it into a short-acting, fast-hitting drug. But even people who swallowed the stuff seemed overly likely to get hooked. Anti-opioid activists began arguing that the previously unquestioned principle trumpeting long-acting drugs as less addictive was mere propaganda from the pharmaceutical industry.
That is until earlier this month, when the LA Times seemed to reveal the missing piece of the puzzle: According to an investigation published May 5, while manufacturer Purdue Pharma has long claimed that Oxycontin's effects last for at least 12 hours, some of the company's own studies showed that for many people, the drug wears off way faster than that.
This means pharmacologists actually are right about the relationship between how long drugs last and the risk of addiction. It could also help explain why some pain patients have faced a higher risk for addiction than they should have, helping produce a jump in addictions that's led to an unprecedented number of overdose deaths in America.
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