'It's all fentanyl': opioid crisis takes shape in Philadelphia as overdoses surge. By Edward Helmore // Drugmakers ‘Complicit’ In Opioid Crisis
Last week, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released figures
indicating that a sharp rise in drug overdose deaths, which many attribute in
part to fentanyl, is causing a drop in American life expectancy. Opioids killed
almost 64,000 people in 2016. The figure for 2017 is likely to be higher again.
In October, Donald Trump declared a
public health emergency.
On the streets of
Kensington, a crisis is taking shape that an anti-drug
advertising campaign proposed by Trump may do little to ease. “Fentanyl
has drastically changed the landscape,” Trainor said. “Sixty-four percent of
fatals in Philadelphia County are fentanyl-related. There’s no dope out here
now, it’s all fentanyl. Even the old timers are scared of it.”
In Kensington, many
addicts congregate in a small park. It has become busier since authorities
fenced off and filled in “the Tracks”, an aptly named encampment near train
lines where residents once set up tables and mirrors to aid fixing in the neck.
Others moved to an underpass on Emerald Street, known as Emerald City. In
either area, even addicts now carry Narcan. It’s an optimistic gesture, but
barely. Nationally, over the
past three years, fentanyl-related deaths have increased by 540%.
For the first time, the majority of fatal overdoses are fentanyl-related,
accounting for “nearly all the increases in drug overdose deaths from 2015 to
2016”, according to
the Journal of the American Medical Association. In Philadelphia, a city
previously known for pure and relatively inexpensive heroin, there have been
nearly 800 fentanyl overdoses this year... read more:
Chicago Area Officials Demand Accountability For Drugmakers ‘Complicit’ In Opioid Crisis
“We believe a good
start is to aggressively confront one of the root causes of this national
epidemic: the pharmaceutical companies and those paid by the pharmaceutical
companies who put profits before public health and safety,” Preckwinkle
added. The officials want the
companies to pay monetary damages for costs incurred by the county’s hospitals
and jail for treating the opioid crisis. The goal is to “hold accountable
those who have been complicit in the creation of this epidemic,” Cook County
State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said in a statement. The
lawsuit cites the companies’ “coordinated, sophisticated, and highly
deceptive marketing” of prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet,
which public health officials have named as a major cause of the opioid crisis....
