The third section of this course attempts to make sense of the medical community’s relationship with drug prohibition over the last 40 years. In a large part, the medical field has followed the lead of the criminal justice system by seeking to “cure� individuals of their addictions and treating substance misuse as a moral problem with a punitive-style medical solution (i.e. abstinence-based drug rehabilitation programming). We have seen how the medical community was somewhat vilified in the early 20th century for enabling “addicts� by prescribing them opioids and cocaine to sooth their ailments, and how the legislature and the courts severely limited their ability to prescribe opioids.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the medical community began to place greater emphasis on the untreated pain of large numbers of patients worldwide. New slow-release opioid medications were marketed as non-addictive and the rate of opioid prescriptions skyrocketed in the U.S. Now 15 years or so later, the most prevalent form of accidental death for middle-aged Americans is accidental poisonings, the vast majority of which are drug overdoses.
Read this article from McGill University and review these charts (one, two) from CDC before answering the question below:
When presented with compelling arguments for the need to treat pain, particularly in poor and minority communities, along with the evidence that shows drug overdoses to be the top killer among middle-aged Americans, how can policy makers and practitioners in the medical community best respond to both concerns (without relying on the criminal justice system)?