Anti-pain medications: French people too addicted to opioids

The French are not only addicted to anxiolytics. For fifteen years, their consumption of opioid painkillers has exploded, leading to an increase in addictions, overdoses, intoxications, hospitalizations and deaths. An increase all the more worrying as Anglo-Saxon countries face a vast health crisis with 64 000 deaths in 2016 in the United States and the recent discovery of more than 456 deaths in a single British clinic between 1989 and 2000. [19659003] Opiophobia and confusion with anxiolytics

In the United States, television advertising is the source of drift. "She was misleading and inciting. Opioid badgesics were presented as super-anxiolytics, able to soothe physical and mental pains. Doctors and health authorities have lost their hands; there was a real social runaway, "says P r Nicolas Authier, president of the French Observatory of Analgesic Drugs (Ofma).

In France, medical visitors also played on confusion and opiophobia. "Opioids are always supposed to be diabolical with a small exception for cannabis," says Fabrice Olivet, director of Autosupport of drug users (Asud). And so in the "strong opioid" category, prescriptions for oxycodone are soaring because the image of this badgesic – with effects similar to those of morphine – is not badociated with an opioid … [19659003] Attention to tramadol

Same phenomenon with tramadol, clbadified as "weak opioid". "But strong and weak, it does not mean anything. Tramadol is the most prescribed opioid badgesic – in front of codeine – and the most involved in poisoning and death, "says P r Authier. It is especially in the treatment of chronic non-cancer pain that the use has "slipped". However, "the situation in France is not comparable to the United States. The prescriptions are very framed. There is a pharmacological surveillance, pain standards, a risk reduction policy … ", says Anne Borgne, President of the Network of Health Care Institutions for the Prevention of Addictions (Respadd).

To put an end to the excesses, a booklet on the proper use of these drugs should be available in the fall, "the final idea being that people with pain can still have access to these drugs," rebadures the P r Authier.