I Approve My Tax Dollars to do That: Impose Tougher Regulation on the Prescription of Narcotics

From a very young age, we’re taught that doctors are “good guys.” Alongside police officers and firemen, doctors help us and are people we can trust. Whatever they prescribe us or inject us with is supposedly safe.

If that is the case, then why have prescription overdoses claimed more lives than heroin or cocaine?

In recent years, attention about misuse of prescription drugs has been directed toward situations in which they are attained illegally: the robbery of a pharmacy, a teenager swiping pills from a parent or sibling’s medicine cabinet, the raiding of a stash at a hospital. Much less focus has been placed on when a doctor has actually prescribed the drug. A Los Angeles Times report half of the patients who accidentally or intentionally overdosed in Southern California had a prescription for “at least one drug that attributed to their death” (http://www.latimes.com/news/science/prescription/la-me-prescription-deaths-20121111-html,0,2363903.htmlstory?main=true)

The majority of people who use pain relievers recreationally get them from friends or relatives but approximately one-fifth obtain them from their doctors. This graph excludes those who do take pain relievers for actual chronic pain.

Photo credit: http://discoveringalcoholic.com/category/prescription-drug-abuse

The Times uncovered some harrowing statics about some doctors having ten or more patients die from prescription drug overdose where the drug they prescribed was the primary agent in the patient’s death. Most never face criminal prosecutions and have spotless records with the California Medical Board. Recently the prescription of narcotic painkillers has shifted from exclusive use in cancer and other terminally used patients to becoming “among the most popular prescription drugs in the United States.” Nationally narcotic painkillers are responsible for approximately 15,500 deaths annually.

The number of drug-induced deaths has rapidly increased over the past decade. Now second only to motor vehicle fatalities, the number of drug-induced deaths has surpassed even gun shot deaths. What the chart fails to distinguish however is the number of suicides as a result of intentional drug overdose. I assume that such deaths would be categorized as suicides but they also pertain to the drug-induced category.

Photo credit: http://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp/prescription-drug-abuse

 How do we still maintain the accessibility of aggressive narcotic painkillers while reversing the escalating trend of overdose-related deaths? Patients who have tried exhausted alternative forms of pain therapy should be allowed access to stronger medication. At the same time, something that struck me about the Times article was how many of Dr. Vu’s patients to whom he prescribed narcotic painkillers were mentally unstable. That class of drugs requires that you be responsible, cognizant and mindful of their power. Thus I support the Times’ proposition to track the correlation between patient deaths and prescribing doctors. If he or she has had a certain percentage of his or her patients overdose and die, in Dr. Vu’s case there were 16 deaths as a result of the medications he prescribed, they should lose their license. Prescribers need to take the severity and strength of these drugs more seriously before automatically resorting to Hydrocodon or OxyContin. Someone needs to be held accountable for essentially putting a gun in these victims’ hands.

A table showing the drugs most commonly abused. Note that all categories are identified as "highly addictive." Two of the three also warn of death if used improperly. My doctor offered to prescribe me Hydrocodon when I was 16 for a back injury. Even as the daughter of two medical professionals, I didn't trust myself with such a powerful drug. I was shocked that she even suggested it. 

Photo credit: http://well.wvu.edu/articles/the_411_on_prescription_drug_abuse

I approve my tax dollars to do that: impose tougher regulation on the prescription of narcotics. 

I Approve My Tax Dollars to do That: Prevent Another Attack

It is no secret that the illegal drug trafficking persists between Latin America, the Caribbean, South America and the United States. From breast implants to teddy bears, smugglers have concocted creative guises to evade authorities and shuttle drugs across nation borders. Now a new even more covert courier has emerged: a fully submersible submarine.

Described as “the Super Bowl of counternarcotics” by Commander Mark J. Fedor of the Coast Guard in a recent NY Times article, these aquatic crafts have been increasingly detected in the Caribbean within the last year.  Semi-submersible submarines are not rookies in the narcotics game; it is their fully submersible cousins that are now startling and worrying authorities. Only required to surface at night to recharge their batteries off the onboard diesel engine, they can travel underwater and therefore virtually invisible from South America all the way to the United States.

In addition to the challenge posed by their imperceptibility, authorities also face the problem of the submarines’ increased carrying capacity compared to their predecessors. The more commonly employed high-powered fishing and leisure boats can transport approximately one ton of cocaine. The fully submergible vessels, meanwhile, can haul upwards of ten tons, which are then ferried to shore by small boats once in shallow enough water.

Of the potential drug shipments identified by the Joint Interagency Task Force South, the group at the helm of American counternarcotic efforts, only one-fourth is ever intercepted. Manpower, aircrafts, and ships simply cannot respond to every shipment. Increasing the number of shipments seized involves working with local South and Central American authorities to prosecute the drug trafficking networks.

But there’s another unique aspect of these fully submersible submarines weighing on the minds of American authorities: the potential use of these vessels by terrorists to transport attackers or weapons. Though such use of submersibles by militants has yet to be detected, no one though a bomb could be smuggled through airport security in someone’s shoes or in a Gatorade bottle (for fact citations, see NY Times article above). Obviously air travel is a much more popular method of travel by the typical citizen, as 48% of adults in the US having flown for business or leisure in 2009 (http://www.ustravel.org/news/press-kit/travel-facts-and-statistics). But it seems both naïve and careless not to protect our ports and coasts from an attack. The United States has been caught unprepared twice within the last 75 years. I personally do not want to see another terrorist attack in my lifetime.

The $15 billion Obama allocated toward combating the drug war in 2010?  (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37134751/ns/us_news-security/t/us-drug-war-has-met-none-its-goals/#.UFSiNu0ZdSo). Yes, I approve of my tax dollars going toward that if it means combating these sneaky submarines.