Bill Against Painkillers

This is great news for not just treatment centers and inpatient treatment centers, but also for America in general. Painkillers have been a leading cause of death in America and finally people are starting to take action and create safeguards.  

"A bill to be introduced Thursday in the U.S. House would require most painkillers to have safeguards to prevent abuse, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Under the provisions of the bill, most prescription painkillers would have some form of abuse deterrence, such as being more difficult to crush or inject. The exact details of how drug manufacturers could meet the new standards are vague, the article notes. The bill does not set time lines for compliance.

If pain medications did not adopt the safety features outlined in the bill, they would be removed from the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approved list of generic drugs. While several brand-name painkillers, such as OxyContin and Opana, have tamper-resistant formulations, most generic painkillers do not.

Patents for OxyContin and Opana are set to expire in 2013. The FDA has not yet ruled whether abuse-deterrent features will be required on the generic versions of those drugs.

“This bill should help protect first-time users and younger people who gain access through relatives or their own family’s medicine cabinets,” the measure’s lead sponsor, Rep. Bill Keating of Massachusetts, told the newspaper. Congress is “understanding the scope of this and looking at it as a major public health epidemic,” he added.

He said there is broad bipartisan support in the House for the measure. The bill’s cosponsors are Republicans Mary Bono Mack of California and Hal Rogers of Kentucky, and Democrat Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts.

The Generic Pharmaceutical Association opposes the bill. “The proposed legislation would be detrimental to patients and could potentially remove FDA-approved safe and effective generic medicines from those who rely on them,” said the group’s president, Ralph G. Neas. “Addressing prescription-drug abuse is of utmost importance to the generic pharmaceutical industry. Policy makers should let the medical evidence guide actions in addressing this critical issue.”"

Source: http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/prescription-drugs/bill-would-require-m...

Pegasus Treatment Center provides hope and healing to those who are in the struggle against addiction. Our inpatient alcohol center brings you an empowering treatment facility that is beyond the best of all Orange County Treatment Centers. 

Teens and Cough Syrup

Though it may not seem like a big deal to a treatment center or inpatient alcohol center, teens abusing household items is a very big deal. It can easily start with something small like cough syrup and escalate to things like hard drugs. 

"Two senators introduced a bill this week designed to prevent the abuse of cough syrup by teenagers. The bill restricts the sale of products containing the cough syrup ingredient dextromethorphan (DXM) to those older than 18, Drug Store News reports.

Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska sponsored the measure, known as the Preventing Abuse of Cough Treatments (PACT) Act of 2012. The PACT Act also places limits on the purchase of bulk (unfinished) DXM, so that only manufacturers registered with the Food and Drug Administration or relevant state agencies have access to DXM in its raw form. Currently, there are no national restrictions on sales or purchase of DXM in this form.

The 2011 Monitoring the Future survey found that 5 percent of teens report abusing cough medicine. Abuse of DXM can cause hallucinations, confusion, blurred vision and loss of motor control.

The Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA) notes that DXM is a safe and effective cough suppressant found in more than 100 cough and cold medicines. The legislation “will give parents an additional tool to prevent abuse, while ensuring access for the millions of adults and families who responsibly use products containing DXM to relieve cough symptoms,” CHPA  President and CEO Scott M. Melville said in a news release.

“By addressing easy access to purchasing cough syrup for teens, the main cause of the harmful trend of its abuse, my bill will help keep our children safe and lessen the strain cough syrup abuse has put on families, hospitals and law enforcement,” Senator Casey said in astatement. “My common-sense legislation will prevent kids from purchasing a drug that has dangerous consequences when abused to get high, while also ensuring it is available to those with a legitimate need for it.”"

Source: http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/drugs/bill-aims-to-reduce-teen-abuse-of...

Pegasus Treatment Center provides hope and healing to those who are in the struggle against addiction. Our inpatient alcohol center brings you an empowering treatment facility that is beyond the best of all Orange County Treatment Centers.

New Study Finds OxyContin Use Decreases

Though it may sound like good news at first if you take a look at the report you will find that OxyContin use has decreased, but Heroin is increasing. I'm looking forward to finding out the percentage of people that actually go to a treatment center after taking these drugs. 

"A new study finds that OxyContin abuse has decreased now that the painkiller has been reformulated to make it more difficult to misuse. Many people who abused the drug have switched to heroin, the researchers report in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine.

The study included more than 2,500 people who were dependent on opioids, who were followed between July 2009 and March 2012. During that time, there was a 17 percent decrease in OxyContin abuse. In 2010, the company that makes OxyContin introduced a new version of the drug that is more difficult to inhale or inject.

During the same period, heroin abuse doubled, ABC News reports.

“I think the message we have to take away from this is that there are both anticipated consequences and unanticipated consequences to these new formulas,” lead researcher Theodore Cicero of Washington University in St. Louis said. “Substance abuse is like a balloon: If you press in one spot, it bulges in another.”

The study found almost one-fourth of participants were able to abuse OxyContin despite the reformulation, and 66 percent switched to heroin. The article notes that a small bag of heroin can cost as little as $5, compared with an 80-milligram dose of OxyContin, which can cost up to $80 on the street.

“Our data show that an abuse-deterrent formulation successfully reduced abuse of a specific drug but also generated an unanticipated outcome: replacement of the abuse-deterrent formulation with alternative opioid medications and heroin, a drug that may pose a much greater overall risk to public health than OxyContin,” the researchers wrote. “Thus, abuse-deterrent formulations may not be the ‘magic bullets’ that many hoped they would be in solving the growing problem of opioid abuse.”

USA Today reported on Wednesday that misuse of the opioid Opanahas increased since OxyContin was reformulated."

Source: http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/addiction/as-oxycontin-abuse-drops-hero...

Pegasus Treatment Center provides hope and healing to those who are in the struggle against addiction. Our inpatient alcohol center brings you an empowering treatment facility that is beyond the best of all Orange County Treatment Centers. 

Teens and Medical Marijuana

This is a very interesting article for those who are involved with different inpatient treatment centers and the research seems to be pointing towards Medical Marijuana. 

"Three-quarters of teenage patients in substance abuse treatment programs in Denver, Colorado said they used someone else’s medical marijuana, according to a new study.

The study revealed that 121 of 164 teenage patients (73.8 percent) have ever used medical marijuana prescribed to someone else.  Patients reported using diverted medical marijuana from one to 1,000 times, with a median of 50 times, suggesting that most adolescent patients have used medical marijuana on multiple occasions, according to Stacy Salomonsen-Sautel, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Division of Substance Dependence. She reported the findings at the recent College on Problems of Drug Dependence, and the study appears online in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

The study found that after adjusting for gender and race/ethnicity, teenage patients who used medical marijuana had an earlier age of regular marijuana use, more marijuana abuse and dependence symptoms, and more conduct disorder symptoms, compared with those who did not use medical marijuana.

As of the end of April 2012, Colorado has 48 registered medical marijuana users under the age of 18. Four of the 164 teenage patients in the study reported being evaluated for a medical marijuana card; however, only one teenage patient received a medical marijuana card. According to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, 96,709 people in the state were registered as medical marijuana users as of April 30, 2012. This means 2.5 percent of the adults in Colorado are registered medical marijuana users, according to Salomonsen-Sautel.

“We don’t know what proportion of the marijuana they are using is medical marijuana,” Salomonsen-Sautel notes. She said the findings imply that there is substantial diversion from registered medical marijuana users. She and her colleagues say the results support the need for policy changes that protect against diversion of medical marijuana, and reduce teenager access to it."

Source: http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/drugs/74-percent-of-teens-in-co-substan...

Pegasus Treatment Center provides hope and healing to those who are in the struggle against addiction. Our inpatient alcohol center brings you an empowering treatment facility that is beyond the best of all Orange County Treatment Centers.

Treatment and The Supreme Court- Great News

This is great news for not just for Inpatient treatment centers, but also for those suffering from addiction. The U.S Supreme Court is making it easier for people with chronic illnesses to find help and make it affordable. 

"The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is extremely uplifting for the substance abuse field, according to A. Thomas McLellan, PhD, CEO of the Treatment Research Institute and former Deputy Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Dr. McLellan, who served on President Obama’s healthcare reform task force, notes the debates and research around the ACA produced two startling facts. “First, unaddressed substance use now costs mainstream healthcare upwards of $100 billion annually, particularly in areas such as ER and trauma care, but also in the treatment of virtually every chronic illness,” he said.

Dr. McLellan added that because of the severity and complexity of their conditions, the 23 million ‘addicted’ Americans are disproportionately costly – but it is the 40-45 million Americans with lower severity but still significant ‘harmful substance use disorders’ who comprise the largest burden of illness and cost to healthcare.

“The second realization produced in the ACA debates is that while there is provision to treat ‘addiction’ in specialty care programs (though clearly more coverage is needed) there had never been healthcare benefits or reimbursement options for those with ‘harmful substance use,’” he noted. “Thus, one of the historic aspects of ACA is the requirement that care services for the full range of substance use disorders be part of the ‘essential benefit design’ in all health plans.”

Dr. McLellan called this “the beginning of a new era in prevention, early intervention and office based care for patients who are not addicted – but whose drinking, smoking, and use of other substances is harming their health and compromising the effectiveness of the care they are receiving for other illnesses and conditions.”

The Supreme Court on Thursday largely upheld the constitutionality of the Obama Administration’s health care law. The mandate was upheld as a tax."

Source: http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/addiction/supreme-court-decision-%E2%80...

Pegasus Treatment Center provides hope and healing to those who are in the struggle against addiction. Our inpatient alcohol center brings you an empowering treatment facility that is beyond the best of all Orange County Treatment Centers.