Do you think every person, every man woman and child, has a legitimate need for 2-4 pills of narcotics each day?
Am I misunderstanding the figure? Instead of 2-4 a day per person, maybe you should calculate how many it is per person with a legitimate need for the drug.
I think you are misunderstanding the figure, it is 72 pill/year/person, so if an average person with a prescription is taking 2-4 (let's just use 3) they will need 365*3 = 1095 pills/year. That rate of consumption implies that 72/1095 = 6.5% of the total population is on a never ending prescription for opiates.
As a percentage of the population, that still seems really high, but WV is taking 0.2 pills/person/day not 2-4 pills/person/day
Chronic pain can use a lot of pills per year. One every couple hours perhaps.
I knew WV was a bit militaristic but some google results and some division imply 10% of the population are military veterans. Its almost believable given how many WV residents I met in the Army, generally extremely nice people BTW. So if no one in WV takes pain pills but military vets, then the vets get a whopping two pills per day and everybody else gets precisely zip nada nothing.
Yeah sure most vets are not taking pain pills. But the guy with no working knees or limbs blown off in an IED, he's probably taking more than two per day, the casualties from one IED explosion could make up for a whole retired company or even battalion of people not ever taking pills. And of course the general population has its own segments of people who have permanent physical problems, or temporary, or are painfully slowly dying of cancer, etc.
Here's another interesting depressing bottom up analysis. Lets say a third of people die of cancer after a year of horrific pain taking ten pills per day and they die on average at age 50 (think of all those heavy smokers and heavy drinkers with annihilated livers, plus the numbers are simpler and to one sig fig don't matter anyway). So if it takes 3650 pain pills per cancer death and a third of the population dies of cancer, that means the average dead took 1000 or so pain pills in the year before they died, and unless we suddenly become immortal that divided by 50 year lifetime means the average person is taking 20 pills per year over the course of their life, even if they never take a pill in their lives until the last year of life before a cancer death and 2/3 of them never take a single pill in their entire lives if they die in car accidents or whatever not from cancer. Now of course not every terminal cancer diagnosis takes an entire year to die and not all medical interventions including cancer in remission take zero pills and not everyone with terminal cancer takes ten pills per day, but none of these assumptions are more than an order of magnitude off on average.
Not really the season for depressing analysis like this, but math is math and the general public is utterly innumerate, so its relevant to the discussion...
I would suspect from this bottom up analysis that dozens of pills per person-year is not too far off from other states numbers and by playing games with careful selection of subgroups you can manufacture all sorts of crazy "surprisingly high" numbers that are anything but.
It's a shame that this journalist, trying to make a name for themselves, feels it's perfectly OK to manipulate the numbers so that it sounds like it's worse than it is. When people read this dramatic account, who don't bother examining the numbers get it in their heads that "something must be done!" it's the people who are in chronic pain that suffer.
Also, since this is coal country, I assume black lung plays a big part in the need for these scripts.
As an aside, I have a family member who had a horrific injury who is on a pain killer script. This person isn't allowed to take an extra pill on days when the pain is worse than normal because the DEA is cracking down so hard on this, her doctor is afraid to subscribe over the government imposed "limit." Pretty sad. Her doctor even suggested she go to a pain clinic because he is concerned about getting heat for total subscriptions.
Didn't we learn anything from the immensely stupid and still ongoing drug war? Fk this journalist.
'Instant' release pills usually last for 4 hours. There are also 'extended' release formulations that generally last 5-7 hours (despite the longer claims of manufacturers).
I'd be surprised if more than 5% (probably even less) of the population should be on heavy painkillers at any given time. I don't know statistics from other countries but we're talking about pills that are being used to treat severe pain, not just a headache.
2x Opiod pain pills a day every day for an entire year is a very serious amount of pain if legitimate.
If a state were to legitimately have 10% of its population that badly hurting, there should be a huge governmental investigation into what factor is causing that much crippling pain.
According to the article, the 780 million pills were hydrocodone and oxycodone pills. Those are highly powerful and addictive opioids. 72 of those per inhabitant of WV per year seems insane to me.
Look at it this way, 15% of the US population smokes. Let's say they smoke a pack a day, 20 cigarettes. If I presented that data to the population as a whole as this journalist is doing, it would be "The US population smokes up to 3 cigarettes per person per day," which is technically true based on the math applied, but grossly misleading.
15*20/100 = 3.
They are applying a number of a subset of the population to the entire population. It's very misleading.
Edit: This journalist is also citing per year statistics, so take my math and multiply by 365, so that would be, "the US population smokes up to 1,095 cigarettes per person per year." The larger number implies that it is much worse. To add a little spice, I could say, "The US population smokes 1,095 cigarettes per year for every man, woman and child," which is exactly the same data set, but it's now implying that children are 1/3 of the people who smoke. Also most people don't envision a 17 year old as a child, so it further implies that young children (say 5-12) smoke.
The saddest part of this whole story is that this is what we can expect from serious journalism in this day and age. Gotta have their clicks!
You're right, that makes sense. So the situation is probably that most of the people take nothing and 5% or so takes 6 a day and lives in a permanent state of sedation.
Sedatives are different. Also people who are on painkillers lose the "high" after a while, so for the most part, they are normal functioning people, which is the idea.
Also, as an aside, take into account that there are 5+ million car accidents a year. I would guess that is or at least is one of the leading causes of chronic pain in the US.
"Drug firms poured..."
>Which is about 72 per year, per person.
That doesn't sound unreasonable. I would guess the average prescription is 2-4 a day per person per year.