Slashdot Mirror
Drug Firms Shipped 20.8 Million Pain Pills To West Virginia Town of 2,900 (foxnews.com)
A congressional committee investigating the opioid crisis has discovered out-of-state drug companies shipped 20.8 million prescription painkillers over a decade to two pharmacies in a Southern West Virginia town with 2,900 people. From a report: Between 2006 and 2016, two drug wholesalers shipped 10.2 million hydrocodone pills and 10.6 million oxycodone pills to Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug in the town of Williamson, in Mingo County, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported. "These numbers are outrageous, and we will get to the bottom of how this destruction was able to be unleashed across West Virginia," the House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J. said in a joint statement.
What gets me about cases like this is how LONG it took to find the pharmacy pushing out 20E6 pills or the individual doctor prescribing hundreds of thousands a year. Yes, the do pop up now and again, but these drugs are tightly controlled. I have to fill out a triplicate form to get a couple of morphine ampules for our ambulances.
Does anybody actually LOOK at those forms. If I ordered 5000 ampules would anyone notice?
Asking for a friend.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Meds Per Person: 22800000.0/2900.0 = 7862.07
Meds Per Person/Year: 7862.07/10.0 = 786.21
Meds Per Person/Day: 786.21/365 = 2.15
Now it is unlikely that the Town is all on these Meds and 2 of these meds a day is very high. I have family suffering from constant pain, and they only use these once a week, in case of extreme pain (And unlike the media, these meds do work), to bring the pain to a manageable level.
However my main point is the news shoving people with big scary numbers, to really prove a point, but while there is still a problem, the real numbers are not as obvious as the article is lead to believe, as this is over 10 years. Not one big shipment.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
7,172 / 10 (years) ~ 717
717 / 12 (months) ~ 60 pills.
Basically, everyone in town was given a standing prescription of take 2 pills per day as needed for pain. Up the script to 3 pills per day as needed and you've got a standing prescription for about 1,925 people. Consider that pharmacies often keep a stock of these pills for rapid fulfillment (Wal-greens will usually have whatever prescription my doc gives me ready within an hour; narc or not), and it's likely that not even that many people have standing scripts.
Also, how long do pharmacies keep med batches on hand? They often have expiration dates slated for 90 days. They're supposed to dispose of unused portions of batches, right? Well, how are they going to keep the stock up to handle the medicated population when they get their next round of scripts? This is going to inflate the order that the drug companies are going to get.
In short, this sounds like someone with an axe to grind trying to inflate emotional response by using a 10 year metric that only indicates how much opiates are getting shipped into community pharmacies, not how much is actually being doled out and prescribed to the community.
realistically how many people per thousand actually need heavy opiates? How many would be in a town that size? 1 in 3 adults are getting prescriptions from the numbers I am finding. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/m...
Let's adjust by 50% to cover children, pregnant women, macho men (I can take the pain), masochists, etc. and divide by 3. That works out to about 483.
483/60 = 8.05 which seems excessive.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The town's population is 3,100. This city is the largest city in the county which has a population of about 30,000.
Surely these pills didn't get distributed only to those living in the city.... So Why do we discuss the size of the town only and not the county which the pharmacies obviously serve too? I'm pretty sure more than just city folks get their prescriptions filled in town.
Somebody is being misleading here....Very misleading. I think on purpose.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
So, in your dog-eat-dog world, the children of the unemployed get squat which translates into a new generation of un-educated, malnourished sprogs who will be a burden when they turn to crime to make ends meet. Their parents might be able to give them pointers on how to do it well.
You can either pay them now or pay for them later, either way, you will pay.
Small towns like that are often 50% or more elderly. By my calculations that would offer 962 people in town a monthly supply of 180pills which is a fairly typical maintenance dose (2 pills 3 times a day). Given the size of the town and the likely high numbers of elderly I find nothing wrong with this other than rather obvious political scapegoating. The real political story in this number is the large number of people with chronic pain and/or cancer. Is this is town a cancer cluster?
Short acting opiates take 20 minutes to affect you, require an hour to reach full potency and gradually fall off till the 4 hour point where they begin to drop off steeply until about 6 hours. Anyone that's taking pain meds for chronic pain is going to be taking doses 3-4 times a day minimum. Typically these people are also at least partly opiod tolerant and will need to take 2 pills at a time.
I see nothing out of the ordinary here.
In 2016, the five states with the highest rates of death due to drug overdose were West Virginia (52.0 per 100,000), Ohio (39.1 per 100,000), New Hampshire (39.0 per 100,000), Pennsylvania (37.9 per 100,000) and (Kentucky (33.5 per 100,000).
[https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/statedeaths.html]
But that's probably a big coincidence.
Given your interpretation of those figures, between 1/3 and half of all people in that county, including the children, are on prescription painkillers.
That is completely unreasonable, and the story is absolutely right to suggest it's newsworthy.
Yes, opiods are over prescribed. But not to extent almost half the population is on them.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
So anyway, yes, these numbers are notorious half-truths and trumped-up to boot. But at the same time they might still point at a problem.
Is that your takeaway from this story? 20.8 million doses of heavy opiates shipped to a town of 2,900 over a decade and you're takeaway is that this "might point to a problem?" I realize you don't live in the US, but do you understand the number and frequency of opiate overdose deaths that are occurring in the US? Do you understand that doctors and pharmaceutical companies are culpable for pushing this product to people who don't need it so that they make more money, while Congress passes laws to restrict it so that people who actually do need it can't get it? Nothing that I just said is political, people would only have a political position on that if they're being paid to have one, or if they have been preached to by a spokesperson with a profit motive.
And then it's fairly important to frame (or re-frame or counter-frame) the narrative into something reasonably solvable
Holding doctors accountable when their patients die from overdose on an unnecessary medication prescribed by the doctor is a good first step. Maybe it will drive some of them away from prescribing without another thought just because they're going to get a kickback when they do prescribe something the person doesn't need. In other words, the profit motive needs to be removed. A complete overhaul of the health care system would also do that, but there are too many people making too much money in order to expect any meaningful change there.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
realistically how many people per thousand actually need heavy opiates?
According to drug manufacturers and wholesalers? About 1,000.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black