If this is not your name, click here. Other Ophthalmic Surgery Organ Transplantation Orthopaedics Other Osteoarthritis Osteoporosis Otitis Otorhino. David E. Joranson, M.S.S.W., from the Pain and Policy Studies Group at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, Madison, and colleagues obtained information on the extent of medical use of opioid analgesics from 1990 to 1996 using data maintained by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Patients are concerned about becoming addicted to opioids.
Health care professionals may be reluctant to prescribe, administer, dispense, or stock controlled substances for fear of causing addiction or contributing to the drug abuse problem. For each episode of drug abuse, as many as four different substances, in addition to alcohol, can be recorded. Several caveats are needed to place these results in context. However, compared with the abuse of other drugs, illicit drugs in particular, the abuse of opioid analgesics appears to be relatively low, accounting for 3.8 percent of total DAWN mentions in 1996. The DAWN system measures only those episodes of drug abuse that result in an admission to an Emergency Department and thus underreports the true extent of all drug abuse, such as drug-related overdoses and deaths occurring out of the hospital.