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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY AS SIN – 

May 1, 2021 – Why is the trial in West Virginia? A year and a half later, Cabell County, which filed its lawsuit in 2017, will argue that the drug distributors failed to refuse and report suspicious orders as the county was inundated with opioids.

From 2006 to 2014, there were more than 81 million prescription hydrocodone and oxycodone pills distributed in the county, enough for 94 pills per year for every man, woman and child. The epidemic fueled by the influx of pain pills has devastated families, spiked crime rates and strained the community’s finite resources, including first responders and foster homes, according to plaintiffs. During the height of the crisis, the West Virginia county had a higher overdose death rate than the opioid-ravaged state.

Attorneys representing Cabell County and Huntington are seeking $500 million from the three companies for recovery efforts to abate the crisis and to offer resources to those who were most impacted. The verdict of this trial could lay the groundwork for settlements in other jurisdictions.

more@WashingtonPost

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL FOR SALE —

May 2, 2021 – Purdue Pharma’s sale of OxyContin, a formulation of the narcotic oxycodone that was said to slow down the release of the strong painkiller when taken as prescribed, has been associated with the rise of the opioid crisis, according to a trillion-dollar lawsuit filed by nearly all US states.

OxyContin was the “most prescribed brand name narcotic medication” for treating moderate to severe pain by 2001, according to a report by the US Government Accountability Office. Deaths from prescription opioid overdose quadrupled between 1999 to 2019, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 247,000 deaths from prescription opioid overdose over the last two decades.  Keefe’s book explores the lives of the billionaire Sackler family who founded Purdue Pharma and profited off of the sale of OxyContin. Forbes estimates the Sackler family’s net worth at $10.8 billion, as of December 2020.

more@BusinessInsider

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

ONLY SEVEN? – 

April 29, 2021 – As children of entitled parents grow up and imitate their parents’ behavior, they may have difficulty finding or keeping jobs. 

“They have not been taught that hard work begets privileges, so they are not accustomed to having to earn things,” said Becky Stuempfig, a licensed marriage and family therapist. “They may be reluctant to get jobs or attempt to cut corners in the workplace. They may struggle with holding down stable employment because they often do not live up to expectations and believe they simply deserve a paycheck without putting forth the effort required.”

Stuempfig added that they may also have legal troubles due to engaging in behaviors that “skirt the law” because they were taught that rules don’t apply to them. The “Operation Varsity Blues” college admissions scandalhighlighted the legal consequences that may stem from entitled behavior in parenting.

“These children may have difficulty creating trusting, intimate relationships because they were not taught positive communication and interpersonal skills,” Stuempfig said. “They may have been told by their parents that others ‘are not good enough’ for them and therefore have a hard time connecting with others in a meaningful way in their adult life.”

more@HuffPost

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WHAT CAN BE DONE? – 

April 26, 2021 – Mr. Wolf, whose mother immigrated from Mexico, spoke to the dealers in Spanish and helped them wire money to their families in Honduras. They showed him pictures of the homes they were building with their drug earnings. Mr. Wolf noted the fancy furnishings and the new cars in the driveways. Eight of the people Mr. Wolf met when he was on the streets are now dead from overdoses.

Mr. Wolf was arrested five times between April and June 2018 for drug possession. The sixth time, he was jailed and charged with violating a stay-away order and intent to sell drugs. In jail, he was given medication to help relieve his withdrawal symptoms. He was bailed out by his brother on the condition that he enter rehab. He is now back with his family.

A lifelong Democrat, Mr. Wolf says he shares the goals of harm reduction in San Francisco. But he argues that some of the programs that the city funds, like handing out foil and straws to fentanyl users, cross the line into enabling drug use.

more@NYTimes

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

DEPENDS ON WHO YOU ASK – 

Nov. 16, 2013 – “I didn’t know you could overdose on Suboxone,” Mr. Verrill said in an interview at a federal prison in Otisville, N.Y. “We were just a bunch of friends getting high and hanging out, doing what 20-year-olds do. Then we went to sleep, and Miles never woke up.”

Suboxone is the blockbuster drug most people have never heard of. Surpassing well-known medications like Viagra and Adderall, it generated $1.55 billion in United States sales last year, its success fueled by an exploding opioid abuse epidemic and the embrace of federal officials who helped finance its development and promoted it as a safer, less stigmatized alternative to methadone.

But more than a decade after Suboxone went on the market, and with the Affordable Care Act poised to bring many more addicts into treatment, the high hopes have been tempered by a messy reality. Buprenorphine has become both medication and dope: a treatment with considerable successes and also failures, as well as a street and prison drug bedeviling local authorities. It has attracted unscrupulous doctors and caused more health complications and deaths than its advocates acknowledge.

It has also become a lucrative commodity, creating moneymaking opportunities — for manufacturers, doctors, drug dealers and even patients — that have undermined a public health innovation meant for social good. And the drug’s problems have emboldened some insurers to limit coverage of the medication, which cost state Medicaid agencies at least $857 million over a three-year period through 2012, a New York Times survey found.

more@NYTimes

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

TWELVE STEPS ARE WAITING – 

April 21, 2021 – Even before the pandemic began, some Americans were drinking significantly more alcohol than they had in decades past — with damaging consequences. In 2020, researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (N.I.A.A.A.) found that from 1999 through 2017, per capita consumption increased by 8 percent and the number of alcohol-related deaths doubled, many caused by liver disease. The trends are particularly concerning for women: Whereas the number of men who reported any drinking stayed mostly the same, the proportion of women who did so increased 10 percent, and the number of women who reported binge drinking, or consuming roughly four or more drinks in about two hours, increased by 23 percent. (For men, binge drinking is about five or more drinks in that period.) Current dietary guidelines consider moderate drinking to be at most one drink a day for women and two for men.

So researchers were understandably apprehensive when, early in the pandemic, alcohol sales spiked. They were especially concerned about women, because similar quantities of alcohol affect them more adversely than men, making them more likely to suffer injuries from accidents and to develop chronic illnesses like liver and heart disease and cancer. But it was unclear whether increased sales would translate into increased consumption. Perhaps Americans were hoarding alcohol as they were toilet paper.

more@NYTimes

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WATCH – VIDEO WORTH WATCHING – 

April 27, 2021 – “It’s called the CAGE test – C is for cut-down meaning if you think that you need to start cutting down on your intake,” Dr. Garcia said. “The A is for annoyance- if you become annoyed by somebody asking you to cut down – and that’s point 2. The G is for guilt – there’s guilt surrounding your alcohol consumption and finally, E is for eye-opener. You wake up in the morning and the only way to function is by cracking that beer or having that shot then if you score 4 out of 4 that’s a definitive problem.”

According to experts, the most commonly abused drug in Texas is alcohol. At any given moment, there are roughly 10,000 Texans in addiction treatment centers for alcohol alone.

“Alcoholism is typically what the most talked about because it’s what is most acceptable,” said Dr. Garcia. “The reality is that it is not necessarily the most common issue that we have.”

But Dr. Garcia says prescription opioids are a big problem as well. 

The Texas Department of State Health Services data on treatment admissions showed that 12% of all treatment admissions involved the non-medical use of prescription drugs.

more@ABC7

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

WHO CAN WE TRUST? – 

April 29, 2021 – What his family didn’t know was that Addiction Specialists Inc., often known as ASI, had a history of violating state rules. In a later federal investigation into the facility’s billing and drug distribution practices, a grand jury concluded that a litany of problems occurred at the business many months before and after Adam’s arrival.  In the wrongful death suit, a lawyer for the Kalinowski family alleged Adam wasn’t evaluated by a physician when he arrived at ASI, didn’t receive the medication or treatment he needed, became increasingly uneasy and anxious throughout the night, and killed himself. An Allegheny County judge in December 2019 said the business, two of its owners — Rosalind and Sean Sugarmann — and an ASI physician were negligent in caring for Adam. The judge ordered them to pay over $1.6 million in damages, although Ian doubts they ever will.

ASI eventually shut down, two years after Adam died. In recent interviews with Spotlight PA/KHN, the Sugarmanns denied responsibility for Adam’s death and maintained that ASI was a good facility. Rosalind said it helped a lot of people in a rural area with a high drug-overdose rate.  At the time of Adam’s death in 2014, the department had taken few disciplinary actions against ASI. It had issued citations and required the company to submit plans to correct them. But the Sugarmanns told Spotlight PA/KHN that, at the time, they didn’t fear the state would shut them down.  The department has no standard criteria for when it should force facilities to serve fewer patients and, as of early April, had revoked just one treatment provider’s license in nearly a decade. It doesn’t, as a regular practice, compare facilities to see if any stand out for an unusual number of violations or the most client deaths. And since state inspections focus heavily on records, they can be tricked with fraudulent paperwork, former employees in the treatment field said.

more@Inquirer

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

MAKES OPIATES LOOK LIKE CANDY

APRIL 29, 2021 – According to a team of researchers led by Leonardo Trasande, organophosphate pesticides, of which chlorpyrifos is the most widely used, accounted for an estimated $594 billion in societal costs, including added health care and education, between 2001 and 2016.

The EPA was poised to ban chlorpyrifos in 2016, but the Trump EPA changed course the next year without providing any scientific justification for its decision. The reversal, made under EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, has been tied to a $1 million contribution to President Donald Trump’s inaugural fund from Dow Chemical Company, now known as Corteva, which was the primary producer of chlorpyrifos.

But the EPA had come close to, and retreated from, banning chlorpyrifos well before the Trump administration. After concerns began to mount in the late 1980s about the harms chlorpyrifos posed to children, environmental groups pushed to get chlorpyrifos banned. Dow and agricultural groups fought back aggressively against the EPA’s regulatory scrutiny, arguing that its removal would lead to shortages of fruits and vegetables. Ultimately, instead of forcing the pesticide off the market, the agency struck a deal in 2000 in which Dow voluntarily withdrew a product containing chlorpyrifos that was used to kill cockroaches and other insects in the home, while the company’s agricultural product, Lorsban, remained on the market.

more@TheIntercept

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Addiction Recovery Bulletin

KIDS NEED A DRINK? – 

April 28, 2021 – The study comparing millennials with Generation Z  found rates of depression among adolescents had surged from fewer than one in ten (nine per cent) to more than one in seven (16 per cent) in the 10 years between the two generations. By contrast the proportion who had smoked in adolescence had almost halved from nine per cent to five per cent, while the number trying alcohol before the age of 14 dropped from 52 per cent to 48 per cent.  

Generation Z were, however, more likely to be worried about their body image, and more likely to be overweight, according to the research by UCL’s Centre for Longitudinal Studies and Liverpool University. Lower self-worth and body confidence has been linked to increased social media use.  Dr Praveetha Patalay, co-author of the research, said the study showed that while there was “good news” that Generation Z were spurning drink and cigarettes, those that did were more prone to depression than the earlier cohort of teenagers.  She said such a link was “concerning” and required urgent action by public health and clinical care planners.  Yvonne Kelly, Professor Lifecourse Epidemiology at UCL, said increased social media use among Generation Z could be linked to the rise in depression.  

“That generation is spending more time engaging with social media and consuming information via those platforms. It could be to do with the content and context of that use,” she said.   

more@MSN

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