Discussion Response: Opioid Use, Addiction, and Overdoses

Opioid Use, Addiction, and Overdoses

The rate of death from over- doses of prescription opioids in the United States more than quadrupled between 1999 and 2010 according to Volkow, N. D., Frieden, T. R., Hyde, P. S., & Cha, S. S. (2014). Prescription opioid addiction is a serious national crisis that affects public health as well as social and economic welfare. One way that opioid addiction is affecting the United States is financially due to the high cost of its prevention and treatment, in 2007 the cost was estimated at around $ 72.5 billion, and this quantity continues to increase over the years. Another way that prescription opioid addiction is affecting United State is in the mortality rate, because the use of opioid during the pregnancy the mortality rate has drastically increased causing costly hospitals stays for newborn with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016).

There are many forms of treatment available to those suffering from opioid addiction, the first form of treatment for opioid use disorders is often medical detoxification (Brown, A. R. 2018). The process can be fast or slow and can be done under a variety of levels of care and supervision. Detoxification works differently in different people and in different treatment plans. Another form of treatment is medication, when supervised by a physician, medications are available to help make this process both safer and more comfortable. According to Coon et al. (2022) opioid addicts are often treated with methadone which reduce the opioid rush making it much easier to go through the withdrawal. An extra form of treatment available is psychosocial interventions, they are highly encouraged as a part of maintenance treatments.

If I had a friend or family member suffering from opioid addiction, I would probably recommend that they seek both psychosocial intervention and medical treatment. Although drug detoxification has been shown to have high relapse rates to dependent use, patients treated with medication are more likely to remain on therapy compared to patients receiving treatment that did not include medication. Combining medication with inpatient or support programs generally has the most success.

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References

Volkow, N. D., Frieden, T. R., Hyde, P. S., & Cha, S. S. (2014). Medication-assisted therapies — tackling the opioid-overdose epidemic. New England Journal of Medicine, 370(22), 2063-2066. doi:10.1056/NEJMp1402780

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2016). Number and age-adjusted rates of drug-poisoning deaths involving opioid analgesics and heroin: United States, 2000–2014. Atlanta, GA: Author. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/

Brown, A. R. (2018). A systematic review of psychosocial interventions in treatment of opioid addiction, Journal of Social Work Practice in the Addictions. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/1533256X.2018.1485574

Coon, D., Mitterer, J.O., & Martini, T. (2022). Introduction to psychology: Gateways to mind and behavior (16th ed.). Cengage Learning.

SAMPLE SOLUTION

Discussion Response: Opioid Use, Addiction, and Overdoses
The first step taken by the author is to provide a statistical overview of the implications of continued use of opioids. The introduction is clear and sets the basis for further discussion in the subsequent sections. The statistical analysis demonstrates to any reader that the authors understand the extent to which opioids can be regarded as a health hazard. Another important aspect that was