Heroin and Opioids - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/heroin
Everything about the massive surge in opioid abuse cuts across traditional boundaries of drug use in the U.S. It’s hit white residents in the countryside as well as minorities in cities. It involves long-banned substances like heroin, legally prescribed painkillers like OxyContin and, increasingly, street drugs that mimic powerful synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Their combined death toll now exceeds that of car crashes or firearms and opioid abuse is seen as a prime factor in declining American longevity. Behind the crisis is a tangle of issues from addiction to treatment to enforcement, regulatory policy involving drugmakers and diplomacy with nations where opioids are manufactured.
Officials of Purdue Pharma Inc., the maker of OxyContin, confirmed in November that they are in settlement talks with a group of state attorneys general and trying to come up with a global resolution of the government opioid claims. States and the federal government have made the opiate-antidote drug naloxone more readily available; it’s been credited with reversing more than 26,000 overdoses between 1996 and 2014. Still, in 2016 fatal drug overdoses jumped by 21 percent, and the rate of deaths from synthetic opioids like fentanyl doubled.
Extracts of the poppy plant have been a source of trouble since the 19th century Opium Wars. Heroin, first produced in 1898 by Bayer, the German pharmaceutical company, was marketed as a non-addictive substitute for morphine. By the early 1900s, widespread heroin use led states like New York to open addiction centers in hospitals. Heroin’s latest wave arose from changes in prescription opiate use. Opioid painkillers rose in popularity in the 1990s, partly in response to what was seen as widespread undertreatment of chronic pain. In 1996, Purdue Pharma Inc. introduced OxyContin as an alternative to stronger opioids reserved mainly for the dying. Its annual sales surged to $1 billion. In 2007 Purdue paid $600 million in fines and its executives pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges for misbranding the product as less addictive than other painkillers. In 2010, it released a reformulated version that was harder to crush for snorting. A May 2015 study found that while the new version reduced illicit use of the painkiller, it led more people to take up heroin, whose price was dropping. Nearly 90 percent of new heroin users in the U.S. are now white, compared with an equal mix of whites and nonwhites before 1980. Globally, poppy cultivation has reached its highest level since the 1930s.