[MisterJoji]

Originally Posted by kermitology

This is just so wrong it's unbelievable. And your previous comparison about it not being heroin.. it's a synthetic opiate. So it's exactly like heroin.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/trevorbu...in-abuse-over/

One of the most powerful themes in the saga of OxyContin is the purported ease by which someone could begin taking the pill to deal with severe pain and then suddenly find they are addicted. The New York Times, for instance, pursued the theme of a negligent marketing and prescribing across multiple stories in the early 2000s emphasizing this problem of “iatrogenic” – i.e., accidental – addiction. There was one problem with that argument at the time, the first being a conspicuous lack of hard data to back it up. A study in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology in 2003 that examined drug overdose deaths for the presence of oxycodone, found that in 96.7 percent of cases, the deceased had multiple other drugs in their system too.

As a 2003 position paper by the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, which included representatives from, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, noted, “the overall consensus in the pain management community is that the majority of chronic pain patients on long-term opioid therapy are not abusing these drugs.”

“There is no persuasive evidence that individuals with no previous history of substance abuse are at risk for becoming addicted when exposed to prescription opioids,” says Dr. Martin Cheatle, Director of the Pain and Chemical Dependency Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Studies of Addiction. He points to a 2008 evidence-based review (Fishbain et al.) of chronic pain patients exposed to chronic opioid analgesic therapy found very low reported abuse and addiction rate – 3.27 percent, which is far below the accepted prevalence of addictions in the general population (10 percent). And this fell to .19 percent when you excluded patients who had a previous history of drug use or addiction or were currently abusing illegal drugs. Additionally, a systematic review of the literature on whether chronic pain patients were likely to abuse opioids (Turk et al.) found that the strongest predictors were a personal history of illicit drug and alcohol abuse.