The number of heroin addicts in the US has more than doubled since 2002.

The most important factor in this crisis is the prescription of painkillers such as OxyContin, which are chemically similar to heroin and have been dished out to US patients in ever-greater numbers over recent years, often through high street pain clinics known as “pill mills”. These have served as gateway drugs to heroin abuse. Officials are now belatedly cracking down on this practice, making such pills harder and more expensive to obtain. But all this has done is prompt more pill addicts to turn to heroin, which offers the same high at a fraction of the price, with the heroin coming from Mexico. A study last year found that 80% of US heroin users had previously used painkillers for non-medical reasons. These pills are a serious problem in their own right, too. Since 1999, the number of overdose deaths caused by them in the US has quadrupled, to 45 people a day. Indeed, over the past four years, “more Americans have died from painkiller overdoses than died during the entire Vietnam war”. (an edited version of an article by Jennifer Peltz, Associated Press).

The disgraceful thing is that the heroin addiction is started off so often by qualified doctors, and that the manufacturers of Oxycontin continue to supply a killer drug without a “sorry about this”.

I was given a similar drug after an operation and it drove me nearly crazy. On the night after the operation I woke up hallucinating. I was convinced that I was in a hotel, that all my belongings had been taken away and that I couldn’t contact my wife. I remember getting agitated. Then, at the door of the hospital ward, appeared two beautiful young women in Scandinavian Airlines uniforms. They walked over to my bed, gazed at me, appraised me carefully, and the prettiest of them shook her head and said to the other, “No, I don’t think so”. This was funny, even in my drugged state. It took several weeks to get the stuff out of my system, and I bore pain in order to do so. How easy it would have been to get hooked. I won’t forget the Scandinavian girls, even if they did (sob!) reject me!

Seriously though, there must be a better way to manage pain. In any event, the future of Oxycontin should be reviewed, and in its existing state, taken off the market. This Epicureans would advocate in the name of humanity and happiness.