Testament to possibility, that this can happen:

A New Study Finds No Correlation Between Opioid Prescriptions and Drug-Related Deaths

The CDC, which issued disastrous pain treatment advice in 2016, is still pushing a narrative contradicted by recent data.

JACOB SULLUM | 8.10.2022 2:10 PM

[....]

The consequences for patients have not been pretty. They include undertreatment, reckless "tapering" of pain medication, and outright denial of care. In 2019, the Food and Drug Administration said it had "received reports of serious harm in patients who are physically dependent on opioid pain medicines suddenly having these medicines discontinued or the dose rapidly decreased." It said the consequences "include serious withdrawal symptoms, uncontrolled pain, psychological distress, and suicide." The extent of such problems was reflected in an admonition that the CDC included in its revised guidelines: "Clinicians should not abandon patients."

The authors of the original guidelines say their advice was misinterpreted and "misimplemented," but that was a danger they should have anticipated. The revised version no longer implies that opioid doses exceeding 90 MME a day are ipso facto medically inappropriate. But it urges caution about raising doses for patients with "subacute or chronic pain" above 50 MME per day, even while emphasizing that does not mean patients who already exceed that level must be forced to get by with less.

"The recommendations related to opioid dosages are not intended to be used as an inflexible, rigid standard of care," the CDC says. "Rather, they are intended to be guideposts to help inform clinician-patient decision making. Further, these recommendations apply specifically to starting opioids or to increasing opioid dosages, and a different set of benefits and risks applies to reducing opioid dosages."

Despite the sharp decline in medical use of opioids, the upward trend in opioid-related deaths, primarily involving illicit fentanyl, has not only continued but accelerated. Last year that number reached the highest level ever recorded. Like the "misinterpretation" of the CDC's advice, that outcome was entirely predictable, since the crackdown on pain pills drove nonmedical users (and some patients) toward black-market products that are much more dangerous because their composition and potency are uncertain and highly variable.

Yet the CDC is still pushing the narrative that more opioid prescribing means more opioid-related deaths. "In addition to the potential risks for patients prescribed opioids, these medications carry risks due to their potential for diversion and nonmedical use among individuals to whom they were not prescribed," it says in the 2022 guidelines. "In the United States, opioid prescribing increased four-fold between 1999 and 2010, and this increase was paralleled by a nearly four-fold increase in overdose deaths involving prescription opioids during the same time period…as well as increases in prescription opioid use disorder."

In light of what has happened since 2010, Aubry and Carr say, relying on those outdated numbers is highly misleading. They say the CDC's advice "should be corrected/updated to state no direct correlation has existed" between prescription opioid sales and drug-related deaths or treatment admissions since 2010, and "individualized patient care and public health policy should be amended accordingly."

nobody's gonna get Oxycontin now, no matter how much pain

Walgreens, CVS and Walmart ordered to pay $650 million in opioid lawsuit

By Marina Lopes and Meryl Kornfield August 18, 2022 at 4:40 a.m. EDT

will be way harder to get than like an abortion...

Recent surge in U.S. drug overdose deaths has hit Black men the hardest

BY JOHN GRAMLICH @ PewResearch.org JANUARY 19, 2022

Nearly 92,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2020, marking a 30% increase from the year before, a 75% increase over five years and by far the highest annual total on record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Preliminary figures suggest that the 2021 death toll from overdoses may be even higher

While overdose death rates have increased in every major demographic group in recent years, no group has seen a bigger increase than Black men. As a result, Black men have overtaken White men and are now on par with American Indian or Alaska Native men as the demographic groups most likely to die from overdoses.

There were 54.1 fatal drug overdoses for every 100,000 Black men in the United States in 2020. That was similar to the rate among American Indian or Alaska Native men (52.1 deaths per 100,000 people) and well above the rates among White men (44.2 per 100,000) and Hispanic men (27.3 per 100,000). The overdose death rate among men was lowest among Asians or Pacific Islanders (8.5 per 100,000).

As recently as 2015, Black men were considerably less likely than both White men and American Indian or Alaska Native men to die from drug overdoses. Since then, the death rate among Black men has more than tripled – rising 213% – while rates among men in every other major racial or ethnic group have increased at a slower pace. The death rate among White men, for example, rose 69% between 2015 and 2020 [....]