Did a 1980 Letter Help Spark the U.S. Opioid Crisis?
(HealthDay News) -- Today's U.S. opioid epidemic is rooted in a 1980 letter to a medical journal that played down the potential for painkiller addiction, a new report states.
The 101-word letter, written by Boston University Medical Center researchers, asserted that "despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction."
That single letter -- published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine -- went on to be cited in hundreds of later scholarly articles as supporting evidence that long-term use of narcotic painkillers rarely caused addiction, said Dr. David Juurlink. He is a scientist with Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto, Ontario.
"The surge in opioid prescribing we have seen over the last 20 years is due in no small measure to doctors being reassured about the safety of opioids," said Juurlink, senior author of the new report.
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The original single-paragraph letter stated that in a review of 11,882 hospitalized patients treated with narcotics, the Boston researchers found "only four cases of reasonably well-documented addiction in patients who had no history of addiction."
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Most of the citations glossed over the fact that the letter focused on narcotic painkillers taken in a hospital setting, where doctors could strictly oversee their use and watch for signs of addiction, said Samuel Ball, president and CEO of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.
"The real opioid problem we have now has been created by free prescribing of opioids to outpatients," Ball said. "More than 80 percent of the subsequent articles did not mention the patients were in the hospital."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/healthtrending/did-a-1980-letter-help-spark-the-us-opioid-crisis/ar-BBBKkM4?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=edgsp
