It should be pretty easy to compare with any comparable country to see what the difference in opioid prescription is.
http://www.painpolicy.wisc.edu/opioid-consumption-data
Here we see the comparison with the AMRO zone (the Americas) which shows the US and Canada prescribe a lot more opioids than any other country in the Americas.
And here we compare AMRO to EURO: http://imgur.com/a/bb4wD
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/15/ameri...
> And what it finds about the United States is jaw-dropping: Even when the list is restricted to the top 25 heaviest consuming countries, the United States outpaces them all in opioid use.
> For example, Americans are prescribed about six times as many opioids per capita as are citizens of Portugal and France, even though those countries offer far easier access to health care. The largest disparity noted in the U.N. report concerns hydrocodone: Americans consume more than 99 percent of the world’s supply of this opioid.
> These data represent the amounts of opioids distributed legally in a country for medical and scientific purposes to those healthcare institutions and programs that are licensed to dispense to patients, such as hospitals, nursing homes, pharmacies, hospices and palliative care programs. Consumption does not refer to the amounts dispensed to, or used by, patients, but rather to amounts distributed to the retail level.
The question becomes - what are doctors elsewhere doing?
- Prescribing physiotherapy for e.g back pains, rather than meds?
Or
- prescribing other kinds of pain medication?
Or something else?
There is also a question of how many of these people had non-prescription addictions and simply switched to prescription drugs because it's convenient and doctors can be persuaded to prescribe.
Here in Europe I know many people (most?) who have been prescribed pain medication at some point, but no one who has had potent opioids outside of hospital. Typical pain med prescriptions are for higher-than-usual doses of non prescription drugs like paracetamol/ibuprofen and only in rare cases weaker synthetic opioids like tramadol.
Hydrocodone and similar opioids are typically only used for terminal cancer patients and are banned from general prescription. Methadone is used for treatment of heroin addiction though.
Making everyone healthy... will not be 100% good for their revenue... but I think they went too far on this.
Hope Trump would serve some delicacies called "justice"
It turns out that opioids, when used to treat long term pain, are more addictive than they thought. And also if you ask people about pain you end up treating a heck of a lot more people.
People in long term pain do need treatment, but that should normally be opioids as a last resort, and carefully controlled in a pain management clinic.
Here's the VA document: https://www.va.gov/PAINMANAGEMENT/docs/Pain_As_the_5th_Vital...
Here's a rebuttal which started the reduction in prescriibing opioids for long term pain: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1924634/