4 Troubled Teens Blog

Over the past few years, West Virginia has experienced one of the highest increases in the rate of drug overdose deaths of any state. Between 1999 and 2004, West Virginia's rate of unintentional poisoning more than quintupled, increasing by an astounding 550 percent. A new study of these deaths has found that most of these fatalities were the result of non-medical/recreational use of prescription drugs. The most commonly identified type of drug in these cases was prescription pain killers.

Beginning in 1997, experts in pain management began encouraging wider use of opioid pain medications for the management of chronic pain problems. The experts also recommended that patients who were prescribed opioid pain medications be carefully evaluated and counseled. In the past 10 years, however, per capita sales of pain relievers in the United States have increased drastically. Notably, emergency room visits and deaths because of pain killer overdoses have also significantly increased.

The West Virginia study was conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. (Source: sciencedaily.com)

Labels: prescription_drug_abuse, overdose, pain-killers

Posted By: Aspen Education Group