For the first time, researchers from McGill University in Montreal (Canada) have looked into overconsumption painkillers in the United States and Canada. Recently, a medical investigation had already tried to alert the American health authorities by pointing out that at least 1 in 10 teenagers had gone to the emergency room. for abusing a painkiller or a sedative during the year. By compiling all the studies already published on the subject, they realized that the number of deaths involving pain relievers (painkillers) commonly prescribed was higher than the number of deaths from heroin and cocaine overdoses combined.
Thus, pain relievers were implicated in more than 16,000 deaths in 2010, in the United States alone. “Currently, the United States and Canada rank respectively 1st and 2nd in per capita consumption of opiates,” said Professor Nicholas King, of the Biomedical Ethics Unit of McGill’s Faculty of Medicine.
Increased prescriptions for opiates
“We wanted to know why thousands of people in the United States and Canada die from the use of prescription pain relievers each year, and why this number of deaths has steadily increased over the past two decades. “. Among the incriminated factors: the increase in the number of prescription opioid painkillers, the increase in the consumption of long-term painkillers such as methadone, the combined use of painkillers with alcohol or other drugs .
“But we have found little evidence concerning the sale of drugs on the internet or prescription errors” insists Professor King. “In fact, we are facing a sort of epidemic of opioid abuse in which physicians, users, health care systems and the environment all play a role,” say the researchers whose study comes from. ‘to be published in the American journal of public health.
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