Obama Administration’s Decision Exacerbated Opioid Crisis, Report Says

According to a new scientific paper, the Obama administration made a mistake that deepened the opioid crisis and triggered the skyrocketing of deadly hepatitis C infections.

As the authors of the paper “A Transitioning Epidemic: How The Opioid Crisis Is Driving The Rise In Hepatitis C” suggest, Hepatitis C kills more Americans every year than any other infectious disease. The Washington Free Beacon adds, “Once infected, the virus can take ten to forty years to fully induce its effects; the results, however, are eventually deadly unless treated.”

Although the number of acute cases of Hepatitis C declined in the years before 2003, when the number of cases stabilized, the number started rising in 2010, apparently after the Obama administration’s FDA permitted Purdue Pharma, the producers of Oxycontin, to reformulate the drug, which users had typically crushed in order to get the oxy needed for a more protracted high. The new version of the drug was offered in a version that left it useless after being crushed, which was thought an effective technique for reducing the deaths among people using it.

Instead, as the paper surmises, many of the former users of Oxyxcontin turned to injecting themselves with heroin, leaving them vulnerable to getting Hepatitis C from unsanitized needles.

The paper notes, “States with above-median OxyContin misuse before the reformulation experienced a 222 percent increase in hepatitis C infection rates in the post-reformulation period, while states with below-median misuse experienced only a 75 percent increase. These results suggest that interventions to deter opioid misuse can have unintended long-term public health consequences.”

The Beacon notes that the new paper “is a spiritual successor to a 2018 paper by economists William Evans, Ethan Lieber, and Patrick Power. ‘How the Reformulation of OxyContin Ignited the Heroin Epidemic,’ which stated, ‘The reformulation did not generate a reduction in combined heroin and opioid mortality. Each prevented opioid death was replaced with a heroin death.’”

NovusDetox explained why Oxycontin users moved to heroin, as it explained the difference in cost for users:

A hit of heroin is a fraction of the cost of the same high from OxyContin (or oxycodone). Prescription narcotics generally sell on the illicit street market at around $1 per milligram. A one-time high from an 80 milligram oxycodone pill for an experienced user would run roughly $80. Heroin, on the other hand, sells in many areas for around $100 a gram. Depending on a user’s tolerance level (long-time users need more per dose) a gram can deliver up to 20 doses, or highs. In other words, it’s vastly less expensive to get and stay stoned on heroin than OxyContin.

The Beacon concludes, “In other words, the new study further confirms that the prescription drug crackdown cannot really abate the opioid crisis. Recent research in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that controlling prescription opioids would only reduce drug deaths by 3 to 6 percent by 2025. Even if all prescription drug abuse stopped in 2016, the paper argued, almost 580,000 people would still die from opioid overdose over the subsequent nine years.”