Tag: Opiods

How Using Opioids for Acute Pain is Like Burning Coal for Energy

Apr 21, 2025

By MATT McCORD

Using opioids to treat acute pain is a lot like burning coal to power our homes. Both are legacy solutions from an earlier era. Both were once celebrated as breakthroughs. And both have since proven to be dirty, dangerous, and incredibly costly to clean up. Despite this, we continue to rely on them, even as safer, smarter alternatives sit right in front of us.

Coal fueled the Industrial Revolution—but it did so at a steep price: polluted air, poisoned water, caused respiratory illness, and climate instability. It was never a clean solution, just a convenient one. Similarly, opioids became the go-to solution for pain not because they were ideal, but because they were easy. They blunt pain quickly, require no special skill to administer, and were aggressively marketed to physicians as safe and effective. We now know the truth: opioids for acute pain can ignite a chain reaction that leads to dependence, chronic pain, disability, and even death.

Short-Term Relief, Long-Term Consequences

The similarities run deep. Coal gives you power today but saddles society with pollution and disease tomorrow. Opioids offer pain relief in the moment but often leave patients worse off in the long run. In both cases, what’s convenient in the short term creates massive long-term externalities—not for the industries that profit, but for the workers, families, and communities left to clean up the mess.

Systemic Pollution

Coal pollution clogs lungs and chokes rivers. Opioids pollute something more intimate—the brain’s natural ability to regulate pain.

Acute use of opioids disrupts normal pain modulation, leading to a phenomenon called opioid-induced hyperalgesia—a worsening sensitivity to pain. It’s like installing a furnace that makes your house colder over time, requiring more fuel just to maintain baseline comfort. That’s the trap many patients fall into after routine surgery or injury.

Hidden Costs and Broken Systems

Coal seems cheap—until you calculate the health consequences, environmental damage, and regulatory burden. The same is true for opioids. The prescription may be covered by insurance, but the downstream effects—addiction treatment, emergency room visits, lost productivity, broken families, foster care placements, criminal justice costs, and overdose deaths—are paid for by the rest of us. And the price is staggering. Like coal, opioids externalize their costs, masking the true price we all pay.

Entrenched Interests and Resistance to Change

Just as coal was propped up by powerful lobbies and outdated infrastructure, opioids have persisted because of habit, inertia, and industry influence. For decades, pharmaceutical companies promoted opioids with junk science and aggressive marketing. Today, the pharmaceutical industry continues to shape public perception—not just through lobbying, but through the media itself. Pharmaceutical companies are among the largest advertisers on television, particularly during news programming. This significant advertising presence may influence media narratives, potentially downplaying the role of prescription opioids in the opioid crisis.

As a result, the public is often fed a new narrative: that fentanyl is the problem, not prescription opioids.

How Routine Medical Care Fuels America’s Opioid Crisis

Mar 17, 2025

By MATT McCORD

When most Americans undergo surgery, they expect to recover quickly and return to their normal lives. Few realize that something as routine as a shoulder surgery, a hernia repair, or a mastectomy can mark the beginning of a life-altering opioid addiction. This often-overlooked connection between routine medical care and opioid dependence demands urgent attention.

How Physicians and Hospitals Sustain the Opioid Epidemic

For decades, the pharmaceutical industry has shaped medical education, ingraining the belief that opioids are the best first-line treatment for acute pain. As a result, American physicians prescribe opioids at dramatically higher rates than their counterparts in other countries. A recent study in Annals of Surgery found that after three common surgeries, 91% of U.S. patients were prescribed opioids, compared to just 5% of the global patients.

Hospitals and health systems have also played a significant role in perpetuating opioid dependence. Opioids have long been a convenient and cost-effective solution for acute pain management, readily available and inexpensive to administer. However, the financial incentives for hospitals extend far beyond the initial prescription. The short-term complications of opioid use—such as nausea, constipation, urinary retention, and hyperalgesia—require additional treatments, increasing hospital revenue. Long-term complications, including dependence, overdose, and addiction, further drive profitability through repeat admissions, extended care, and emergency visits. In effect, hospitals and health systems have become financially reliant on opioid-based care, benefiting from both the immediate and prolonged consequences of opioid prescribing.

A study from the University of Michigan/IBM Watson revealed that a single opioid prescription after elective surgery increased healthcare costs by an average of $5,680 per patient per year across all payer types, including Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurance. This widespread cost increase affects insurance premiums, employer healthcare spending, and state and federal budgets. Notably, this estimate does not even account for the long-term costs of addiction treatment, which can be 2-16X that cost per patient per year.

The Devastating Impact of Routine Opioid Prescriptions

Each year, over 60 million surgeries are performed in the U.S., leading to the prescription of 45 million new opioid prescriptions per year. But the real crisis lies in what happens next: nearly 10% of all surgical patients remain on opioids long after their recovery should be complete. That means 2-4 million Americans every year are still using opioids beyond 90 days post-surgery.

The Courage of Corporate America is Needed to End America’s Opioid Crisis

Dec 11, 2023

By RYAN HAMPTON

A Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll published in July found that three in ten U.S. adults (29%) said they had someone in their family who struggled with opioid dependence. Also surprising, and encouraging, was the statistic that 90% support increasing access to opioid use disorder treatment programs in their communities.

As a person in recovery from opioid use disorder and advocate, my read on this data set is that the public support is there. Now more than ever, we need leaders in healthcare, public policy, and corporate America to have the courage to advance effective treatment options. The most inspiring example of the kind of courage we need was the recent news that one of the nation’s largest retail grocery and pharmacy chains, Albertsons, made the financial investment to train their pharmacy staff to administer buprenorphine injections (known as Sublocade) on site.

To someone who is not in the weeds on the issue of opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment programs, this may just sound like a solid business decision. But go a layer deeper and the courage is evident: Albertsons decided to invest in an underutilized treatment option (despite buprenorphine being the gold-standard in OUD treatment) that serves a highly stigmatized patient population who is often shunned at pharmacy counters nationwide. Albertsons chose to put treatment centers for an underserved and highly stigmatized patient population in the middle of their family-friendly, neighborhood grocery pharmacy chain.

The company rightly recognized that OUD impacts every family and community in this country—including the lives of its patrons. Albertsons pushed through stigma, not leaving the overdose crisis for someone else to address, because it had the ability to provide widespread access through its pharmacies and locations across the nation.