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Essay On Opioid Epidemic

606 Words3 Pages

Opioid Epidemic
Prescription drugs are meant to help people not hurt them, although there are often some cases where the user either intakes too much or missuses the drug. Doctors do provide the dosage to intake on the label when they prescribe the drug. The most common way of misusing opioids is overdosing. Opioids are also sold as a street drug in the public. These drugs can be exposed to many young people and adults. Opioids have effects on humans in many ways. There are many solutions to decrease opioid uses and the opioid crises.
Prevalence
Opioid use keeps increasing day by day; many people of different ages and sexes are either abusing opioids or are either addicted due to doctor prescriptions. From 1999 to 2014 opioid overdose nearly tripled; during 2014, 61% of 47,055 drug overdose deaths were from opioids (Rudd et al., 2016). Males tend to get addicted …show more content…

The causes of overdose are either misuse of opioids peer pressures or doctor’s orders. Taking low doses of opioids still has a very high chance of addiction. Taking opioids for more than three months at very low doses increases chances of addiction by 15 times (CDC Vial Signs, 2017). Opioid crises is caused by either unnecessary opioid prescribing or people abusing the drugs for their own purposes.
Solutions
This opioid epidemic is causing hundreds of people to lose their life every day. If the people use opioids correctly and only when they are necessary to use the overdose and addiction rates would decrease by big margins. Some other solutions are: to expand the use of Naloxone, which is a safe antidote that reverses the overdose of opioids, improve detection of illegal opioid use, improve opioid prescribing, and the use of drug mentoring programs (Rudd et al., 2017). These solutions could help save many lives and provide people safe medications.

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