Opioid

He didn’t know it at the time, but Dr Andrew Kolodny had begun to witness the beginnings of a major drug addiction crisis in the United States of America (USA). A public health expert on drug dependency at New York City’s health department in the early 2000s, Kolodny worked in poor neighbourhoods from South Bronx to central Brooklyn blighted by crack cocaine and heroin. “It was while we were working on the illicit drugs problem that we noticed drug overdose deaths were increasing in middle-class communities in the New York City area,” he says. Before 1995, the prescription of opioid painkillers in the USA was limited to people with pain from advanced cancer, severe injuries or after major surgery. That restraint was founded on the fear that patients might become addicted and the bitter experience of two opioid epidemics: in the early 1900s when heroin was sold legally for various ailments and an epidemic of illegal heroin dependency in the 1960s during the Vietnam War....

Additional Resource: Curbing Prescription Opioid Dependency (4038 downloads )