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Opioid Addiction Research Paper

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we are living through the worst epidemic of addiction in american history, and the drugs causing the most deaths are legal prescription opioids like oxycontin, percocet, and vicodin. How did so many of us get addicted to painkillers? and why are so many americans dying from drug overdoses? to find out you have to go back to the early 90s. Before that time doctors generally considered opioids dangerous but in 1996 a company called purdue pharma released a new drug ,oxycontin. purdue spent hundreds of millions of dollars to convince doctors that oxycontin was safe and not addictive. there marketing strategy worked, their prescriptions for oxycontin skyrocketed but purdue 's claim that oxycontin was safe and not addictive just wasn 't true. as sales skyrocketed so did addiction, overdoses, and death. …show more content…

users also found that they built up a tolerance to oxycontin and other prescription opioids and that 's where heroin comes in. heroin is an opioid like oxycontin though lots of people who built up a tolerance to prescription painkillers moved on to heroin and today more americans are addicted to heroin and die from it than ever before. The abuse and misuse of opioid products containing oxycodone and hydrocodone, including brands such as OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet and Lortab increased significantly in the early-to-mid 2000s, doubling between 1998 and 2008. In 2002, 6.2 million Americans were abusing prescription drugs, and emergency room visits resulting from the abuse of narcotic pain relievers had increased dramatically. The misuse and abuse of prescription painkillers was responsible for more than 730,000 emergency department visits in 2009, a number that nearly doubled in just five

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