Fentanyl drives Ohio's overdose deaths to record

[Julian Englis]

Source: The Columbus Dispatch

Fatal drug overdoses kept rising in Ohio last year to a record 4,854, a 20 percent increase over 2016?s toll.

It was the eighth year in a row that drug deaths increased, according to data on unintentional drug deaths reported to the Ohio Department of Health.

County coroners logged 804 more fatal overdoses in 2017 than the 4,050 reported the previous year.

Powerful and deadly fentanyl continued to fuel Ohio’s raging drug epidemic. The synthetic opioid accounted for nearly three-fourths of deaths, killing 3,431 people in 2017, 46 percent more than in the previous year.

Read more: http://www.dispatch.com/news/20180923/fentanyl-drives-ohios-overdose-deaths-to-record

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More Republican leadership.

[cstanleytech]

1. My mother was on high dose patches of that stuff before she died

4 years ago (in fact I still have some of the and I really need to go through here stuff and throw it and her other medications out one day) and even then I knew I had to handle the stuff carefully when replacing her old patch with a new one as it can kill you if mishandled.

[SergeStorms]

3. A new pain management doctor...

tried to get me on the Fentanyl patches. I damn near died. My heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration dropped to levels that made me call an ambulance. It's a good thing I was aware of what my body was doing. I refuse to try them again, even at a lower level, because that shit is awful!

[SergeStorms]

2. Yet they....

continue to count serious pain management patients along with street junkies in the "Big Opiate Death Scare". They've cut my pain meds in half because of the "Big Opiate Death Scare". There are genuine pain management patients who are suffering because street junkies can't resist taking drugs they know absolutely nothing about, or where those drugs came from. And contrary to what Pain Management Doctors are commonly telling their patients these days, your body does not respond the same to half the medication as they once prescribed for us. That's total bullshit, but the CDC and DEA have Doctors so scared to prescribe opiates these days they don't know whether to shit or go blind. My quality of life has suffered greatly since they cut my meds, and there's absolutely no hope of ever returning to the life I had before.