Persuasive Speech On Opioids

701 Words3 Pages

I. Scope In the past seventeen years, the United States witnessed an acute crisis with a notorious classification of medication: opioids. Opioids are prescription painkillers where the medication attaches to opioid receptors in various parts of the human body, such as the brain; the binding of the drug and receptor reduces the quantity of pain by diminishing the number of pain messages to the brain. This type of medication originated in the 1970s, but it would solely take two decades for an Opioid Crisis to flourish at an exponential rate. In the 1990s, an increasing amount of physicians prescribed opioids, such as Fentanyl and Oxycodone for chronic pain, even when the pain symptoms were substantially mild. This overprescription of opioids …show more content…

On top of the widespread usage, these types of medications are profoundly infamous for their addictive repercussions. Opioids consist of a natural substance known as an endorphin; endorphins are natural painkillers that the brain and nervous system produce to combat chronic pain. Nevertheless, opioids can produce up to one hundred times more endorphin than the human body, and, thus, the intake of this medication causes the brain to cease endorphin production. This is where the addiction arises: a lack of opioids parallels to a lack of endorphins. Once the opioid effects halt, the amount of endorphin the body generates insufficiently meets the quantity of endorphin the body requires as a result of opioid adaptation; therefore, the addiction spirals out of control for the individual, the society, and …show more content…

Nevertheless, the President, in order to foster a more profound effort against the epidemic, must request funding in the billions from Congress to fund opioid addiction treatments across the United States. Under current conditions in the country, opioids, such Oxycodone, Fentanyl, and Heroin, is more accessible than the addiction treatments sparsely available due to drug trafficking, which, as a result, causes considerable opioid abuse and overdose. When these addiction treatments become more widespread than the opioids, the United States can ultimately observe dramatic decreases in opioid