Here's a scary fact: in 2014 47,000 Americans died from drug overdose. That's
a new record. But if you peel back the numbers, many of these Americans are not
dying from illegal drugs.
The main killer is not cocaine, meth, or heroin. Instead, totally legal opioid
painkillers were the biggest cause of overdoses. How did we get to this point?
LOPEZ: "So in the 1990s, doctors were under a lot of pressure from advocacy groups
of federal government to treat pain is this really serious medical issue and
there was a pretty good reason for that. There were about a hundred million
Americans suffering from chronic pain."
NARRATION: "The undertreatment of pain is a major public health problem whatever the cause,
some end up shuttling from doctor to doctor desperate for relief." Under this
pressure, doctors turned to opioid painkillers: highly potent drugs that
bind to receptors in the nervous system and reduce pain messaging to the brain.
And one reason doctors turned to opioid painkillers is because drug companies
like Purdue Pharma said that they were safer and less addictive than other
painkillers on the market. DOCTOR: "We now find that these medicines much so much more
powerful much more versatile than we used to think. And we feel that they
should be used much more liberally for people with all sorts of chronic pain."
LOPEZ: "Yeah, that wasn't true at all that these drugs were safer than the other ones on the
market and in fact Purdue Pharma ended up paying hundreds of millions of
dollars in fines for its false claims later on." The damage had been done and by
2012, physicians wrote 259,000,000 prescriptions for
opioid painkillers, enough to give a bottle of pills to every adult in the country.
Since opioid painkillers are so addictive, millions of patients got
hooked on the drug. And as use proliferated, many patients overdosed.
In 2014, nearly 19,000 drug overdoses linked to opioid painkillers. About 40% of all
drug overdoses recorded that year.
LOPEZ: "So yeah, here's where it gets like really ugly. Doctors began pulling back these
prescriptions, but what that actually ended up doing is that because these painkiller addicts
were already using and addicted to opioids, is that they just went to another opioid: Heroin.
People who are addicted to painkillers are 40 times as likely to be addicted
to heroin since 2000 heroin overdoses are up by 500% more than 10,000 people died
of heroin overdoses just in 2014." The government is finally responding to this
whole problem. The Obama administration, along with local state and private
efforts have significantly increased funding for prevention and treatment
programs. But fundamentally doctors still need an alternative to treating chronic
pain. One option that has gotten surprisingly little attention is another
contentious political issue,
medical marijuana. LOPEZ: "The research on pot -- it's still pretty early in large part
because they're so many restrictions. The research that has been done suggest pot
is actually really good. Not for every chronic pain patient, but for a lot of
chronic pain patients. And unlike opioids, pot isn't linked to deadly
overdoses. That doesn't mean it's perfectly safe, but it doesn't kill
people in the way opioids do."
Studies also show that states with medical marijuana dispensaries tend to
have fewer opioid overdose deaths. In the best study done so far the research said
that providing broader access to medical marijuana may have the potential benefit
of reducing abuse of highly addictive painkillers. LOPEZ: "I mean I wouldn't say that
medical marijuana's like the only option for dealing with opioids. But right now doctors
are in a really bad position. They want to treat pain as a serious medical issue. The drugs that
they were relying on, opioids, have caused this massive, very urgent crisis, and marijuana
it might not be the perfect solution, it won't work for everyone, but at least
it's something to go on right now."