The Law and Social Values: Prescription Pain Killers

Excerpt

In civil and criminal cases, judges in the US legal system often are faced with conflicting societal norms that ultimately influence the outcome of a lawsuit, and set legal precedent. Of interest to medical professionals is the recent concern about the increasing use of opioid analgesics by patients. While it is recognized that opioid drugs have legitimate uses for some patients who suffer from pain, there is also a serious social concern about prescription drug-related addiction and deaths related to prescription-drug overdoses in the United States, and the problem may have reached epidemic proportions [10]. The problem may arise, at least in part, because of overprescription of opioids by US physicians [10]. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), opioids and heroin were implicated in 28,647 overdose deaths in 2014 [16]. In the preceding year (2013), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) reported 46,471 deaths from drug overdoses in the United States; more than half of these resulted from prescription painkillers and heroin [9]. To place the figure in perspective, fewer people died from car crashes or from firearms in the United States during that year, according to the CDC [9]. …