Politicians are now causing even more pain by blaming prescription pain pills for the Opioid epidemic. People who become doctors spend a lot of time in medical school so you would think they’d have the intellectual and moral backbone to 1) learn about issues like this and 2) push back at politicians and media that are clearly (yet again) wrong. But no. Here is Peter Pischke:
How negligent media have helped inflate a deadly moral panic over prescription opioids and ignored the real sources of addiction, while hurting people who live with devastating chronic pain.
Angela Kennecke is a popular reporter for a television news station in my hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Each weeknight, Kennecke is at the anchor desk for KELO, a CBS affiliate, and has been there as long as I can remember. For many people in the “Sioux Empire,” Kennecke’s work on television is a normal part of the day, and they can count on her to tell them how it is.
But Kennecke’s objectivity was shaken in May 2018, when her 21-year-old daughter, Emily, was found dead after overdosing on heroin that had been laced with the opioid fentanyl. This tragedy, which made national news, deeply affected Kennecke and the Sioux Falls community. Now, almost a year since Emily’s death, Kennecke has become South Dakota’s leading reporter on the opioid crisis.
Fentanyl in the medical setting is the narcotic drug most commonly administered during surgery. Outside the surgical room, it is primarily prescribed by doctors in the hospital to palliative care patients due to its high potency, which is 50 to 100 times greater than that of morphine. Unfortunately, fentanyl is also dirt cheap for black-market drug dealers to import from China and Mexico. In recent years, traffickers have increasingly turned to fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute.
Read more “Blaming Prescription Pain Pills For The Opioid Epidemic Is Fake News”: The Federalist
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