Oxycontin: Balancing Risk and Benefits
WASHINGTON, Feb. 12–Seated in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Tuesday, Nancy Green, a certified nurse and mid-wife, told stories.
One story was about a young man who, after snorting the prescription pain killer OxyContin, found that his nose was bleeding. He saw remnants of the pill in the blood, but instead of cleaning the blood from his hands and face, he picked out the pieces and shoved them back into his nose.
Another story was about a grandmother whose doctor prescibed OxyContin pills for her pain. When she opened her pill bottle one day, almost all the pills were gone. They had been stolen.
Green told another story, not her last, about a young woman who lives in Green’s rural hometown of Calais, Maine, and who is getting over an OxyContin addiction. The young woman told Green to say this at the hearing: “Take OxyContin off the market. If you can’t,” then impose more regulations on it. “Don’t make it easy for us to get.”
The committee also invited physicians, drug enforcement agents and drug researchers to discuss the balance between the OxyContin’s value as a drug to alleviate severe chronic pain and the need to stop the abuses that many areas of the country, especially rural ones, are experiencing.
“It’s a difficult balance to strike,” committee member Susan Collins said. “OxyContin has proven to be a lifeline for people living with chronic pain, and that’s why it should remain on the market.”
OxyContin, an alternative to morphine, has proven to be effective in helping to relieve pain. “I worry about the people who suffer from cancer,” Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said, if the drug’s use if restricted.
Green agreed that OxyContin can “benefitápatients with chronic pain,” but she has observed its destructiveness in rural Maine communities in Washington County, where, according to her testimony, “adult arrests for possession of synthetic narcotics were 2.5 times that of the state. The rate of possession of opiates or cocaine was twice the state average.”
“The geographic isolation, combined with a lack of transportation, contribute to a substantial barrier for substance abuse patients to access medical and mental health care or social science,” Green said in her testimony..
Here are some of Green’s recommendations::
— Expeditiously award federal grants for rehabilitation, a measure Collins supported.
— Regulate the movement of people across the Canadian border to obtain prescription drugs that are “50 percent” cheaper.
— Ask Purdue-Pharma, OxyContin’s manufacturer, to establish foundations and make donations to help affected communities plagued with opiate addiction.
— Install a monitoring system that will track how often physicians prescribe drugs.
Collins especially agreed with prescription drug monitoring of physicians: “Sure there’s more it [Purdue-Pharma] could do and could have done to anticipate the potential for abuse and to take steps to work more closely with physicians.” Purdue-Pharma’s marketing technique was also debated at the hearing. While Paul D. Goldenheim, vice president for research at Purdue-Pharma, said he did not think the marketing techniques for OxyContin were different from comparable prescription drugs, Collins said she thought differently.
“I got the picture of a company that was pretty relentless in pushing this medication and encouraging its prescription,” Collins said. OxyContin has been “invaluableábut when I learned that Purdue-Pharma spent $200 million last year pushing this product, thatámakes me wonder whether the company is providing sufficient information about the possibility of abuse of this product.”
Published in The Bangor Daily News, in Maine.
