How to tell if a loved one is abusing opioids

Medical attention is still urgently needed after the administration of naloxone. About 45% of people who use heroin started with misuse of prescription opioids. Ask yourself some questions about signs of opioid addiction your loved one’s personal risk of opioid use disorder and the changes you’ve seen. Reach out to your loved one’s healthcare professional if your answers point toward a possible addiction.

Physical dependence and addiction

Over time, their effect can make you want to keep using the medicine or use it incorrectly. This can lead to changes in brain function that cause you to develop a powerful urge to take opioids. Anesthesiologists are the most highly skilled medical experts in anesthesia care, pain management, and critical care medicine, with the education and training that can mean the difference between life and death. Opioids are highly addictive, and opioid abuse has become a national crisis in the United States. Statistics highlight the severity of the epidemic, with the National Institute on Drug Abuse reporting that more than 2 million Americans abuse opioids and that more than 90 Americans die by opioid overdose every day, on average.

Public Health

Talk to your children about how dangerous opioid drugs can be and why it’s important to use them (and all other medications) only as prescribed. If you think you or your child may be using opioids nonmedically or are developing dependence, seek help as soon as possible. Overlapping factors such as genetic vulnerabilities, issues with similar areas of your brain and environmental influences cause both substance use disorders, such as OUD, and other mental health conditions. Heroin is often easier to get than opioids that are meant to be prescriptions.

• Other drug treatments for opiate withdrawal include methadone and the blood pressure medicine clonidine.
• They can also help you cope with avoiding opioids, dealing with cravings, and healing damaged relationships.
• Instead of OUD, sometimes people use the terms “opioid dependence” and “opioid addiction.” Dependence means feeling withdrawal symptoms when not taking the drug.

Treatment Outcomes Specific to Prescription Opioid Use Disorders

• Unfortunately, some countries such as Russia forbid opioid substitution therapy such as buprenorphine and methadone.
• The typical progression for those who had started with prescription opioid pills was – first regularly taking the pills, then chewing them, then crushing them into powder and sniffing or smoking them.
• In addition, individuals using naltrexone for MOUD have a reduced tolerance to opioids, and therefore, using the same, or even lower doses of opioids used in the past, can cause life-threating consequences.
• Frequent pain killer users were at an increased rate of injecting heroin, as well as at increased odds of having heroin dependence compared to those who reported no nonmedical use of prescription pain killers.
• Many other treatments are available, including less addictive pain medicines and therapies that don’t involve medicines.

McLellan (2002) argues for a continued care approach in substance abuse rehabilitation, just as with chronic diseases, rather than treating these disorders as ones that can be fixed in one single treatment programme. He argues for monitoring of patients; continuously checking in to see how they are doing with their ongoing and lifetime susceptibility to relapse, and utilising different sources such as physicians, case workers and counsellors to ensure the best chance at maintaining sobriety. In a case-control study comparing prescription opioid users in Utah and those that had died from prescription opioid- related deaths, decedents were more likely to smoke daily, not have graduated high school and have been divorced, separated and/or lived alone.

How Naloxone Saves Lives in Opioid Overdose

These issues need to be addressed on a state-level in order to ensure that doctors have easy access to their patient’s information. Additionally, because these programmes are instituted on a country by country, and further, a state-by-state basis, it is possible that a patient could just go to another state to ‘doctor shop’. It may be worth considering putting federal and national databases into place. It is hard to control the situation of friends and relatives passing off their drugs to someone else. That is, pain killers may be obtained through a legal prescription but then go on to be sold or gifted to partner’s, friends, or family members for illicit consumption or misuse (Alexander, Kruszewski, & Webster, 2012).

• They also found that targeting middle schoolers and designing programmes that can be delivered by peer leaders could increase the effectiveness of school-based substance use prevention programmes.
• In America, the prevalence of lifetime heroin use was around 1.6% among adults in 2013, and prevalence of heroin use disorder was 0.69%, up significantly from 0.33% and 0.03%, respectively, when measured in 2002 (Martins, Sarvet, Santaella-Tenorio, Saha, Grant, & Hasin, 2017).
• If some of these pathways are better understood, new therapeutic approaches could be developed to help target the early stages of opioid addiction.
• The data comes from a mix of federal, state and local law enforcement organizations.
• Drug dependence occurs with repeated use, causing the neurons to adapt so they only function normally in the presence of the drug.

Additionally, incarceration, which is often due to involvement in drug-related crimes in the United States, has been found to be negatively related to abstinence from opioids in a long-term follow-up review (Hser, Evans, Grella, Ling, & Anglin, 2015). Doctors in these rural areas may prescribe opioids to treat chronic pain for work that requires heavy labour, such as logging, farming, mining and working in factories. Many of these industries are declining, and thus people are left unemployed and hopeless when there are no more jobs available. Some workplace injuries lead to chronic pain, such as coal miners developing silicosis, a lung disease.

Almost half of last year’s fentanyl seizures were in fake pill form, compared to just 10% of fentanyl seizures at the start of that period. This image provided by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department shows suspected fentanyl pills seized at Los Angeles International Airport in 2022. The brand name treatments Horizant and Gralise are extended-release formulations of gabapentin, but are not approved for the treatment of epilepsy.

Opioid misuse in Asia is low at around 0.35%, however, data is not available for all Asian countries. South-West and Central Asia have higher opioid use rates compared with East and South-East China; the average prevalence for opioid use in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan is estimated to be 1.5% and 0.8% in Central Asia. In Western Europe, past-year use of opioids is estimated to be 0.4%; however, Eastern European prevalence rates hover around 1.2%, while South-Eastern European is around 0.8% (UNODC, 2014). Consumption of substances to alter mood, manage pain and relieve other mental and physical ailments and symptoms is common and can help persons cope with serious illness.

• Better healthcare could result in lower out of pocket medication costs for prescription opioids which could in turn increase access to opioids by adolescents who are in an at-risk environment (Sussman et al., 2012).
• Childhood sexual abuse has been linked to increased risk for initiating injection drug use (Hadland et al., 2012; Roy et al., 2003).
• Increasing rates of drug addiction have contributed to recent decreases in U.S. life expectancy.
• The CDC guidelines recommend nonpharmacological and non-opioid pharmacological therapy as the first-line of treatment for pain, except in more severe cases such as palliative, active cancer or end-of-life care (Dowell, Haegerich, & Chou, 2016).

Why do people become addicted to opioids?