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average amounts of prescription painkillers for this group exceeded the manufacturers’ recommended doses. “Patients with mental health or substance use disorders are at increased risk for nonmedical use and overdose from prescription opioids,” said Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These patients may receive prescriptions for the drugs and are at high risk of combining them with other legal and illegal drugs and/or alcohol. Prescription opioids were responsible for more than 17,000 deaths in 2017, and other synthetic narcotics, prescribed or illegal, killed more than 28,460 people. Women’s Risk Is Increasing More men than women die from prescription painkiller overdoses, but the rate of women dying from painkillers has increased more than 400 percent since 1999, according to the CDC. For every woman who loses her life due to a prescription painkiller overdose, thirty go to the emergency room for help from overdoses or abuse. The CDC reports that between 1999 and 2010, almost 48,000 women died from overdoses of prescription painkillers. Every year since 2007, more women have died from drug overdoses than from car accidents. Dr. Kirtly Parker Jones reported in the University of Utah’s Healthcare Scope broadcast that about 4.5 million women in the US have a drug abuse problem, and that women become more quickly addicted than men. Women are more often diagnosed with pain and anxiety and physicians more often prescribe not only painkillers, but anti-anxiety drugs like benzodiazepines (Xanax). In combination, painkillers and drugs like Xanax can be deadly. Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania has conducted several long-term studies of prescription opioid use and misuse using records frommore than 1.2 million patients. Geisinger

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Painkillers: The Scourge on Society

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