Center of Disease Control vs American Pain Foundation

being addict or suffering from an unrelieved pain: you choose

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Sales of OxyContin reached the amount 3.1 billion dollars last year in the USA. Are the Americans addicted to painkillers? The Center of Disease Control and the American Pain Foundation do not seem to share a similar point of view of the question. APF advocates against the trend of under treatment of sever pain while CDC warns against the dangerousness of opioids abuse. The Lincoln lawyer Mickey Haller the character of Michael Connelly the well known novelist was just discharged from a rehab stay for addiction to OxyContin at the beginning of the Brass Verdict Novel (2008).
However there is an expression of concern because the APF seems funded at an unusual high level by drug companies that sales opioid medicine. At least the APF independence should be considered with caution.
The central question is how to regulate pain killer prescription without discouraging physicians from relieving patients from suffering.
On one hand 14000 persons per year die from overdose by opioid pain killers like Roxicodone or OyContin (more than heroin and cocaine combined) and in an other hand numerous patients will be relieved from pain only by this class of medicine.
Pain and addiction are two battles of equal importance to win as they are both enemies of the human dignity. The irony of the situation is that the same products, stemming from Mother Nature, relieve the former and cause the latter!

Read more:

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-champion-of-painkillers

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