Overdoses kill more than car crashes in Pima Arizona

Overdose deaths from prescription drugs have outpaced car crash fatalities in the United States for the first time.That's according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mortality data for 2009.The findings have local doctors concerned, and Madison's three hospitals have developed a new plan for dealing with narcotic prescriptions, WISC-TV reported.The CDC said it couldn't confirm the findings because it didn't do the analysis, but it said it doesn't disagree. CDC representatives said they believe that by the time the preliminary data is finalized, the number of overdose deaths will be higher.For years, car crashes were the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. But in 2009, the most recent year the CDC has data for, prescription drug overdoses became the leading cause of death.It wasn't long ago that Dr. Kyle Martin said he wrote a prescription for the powerful painkiller Oxycodone for a man who said he was suffering from back pain."He'd never been seen here before for pain, and Oxycodone was the only thing that worked for him," Martin said. "And I hadn't even left that morning and he had been found blue and not breathing in a library bathroom. It sounds like he had snorted all of the Oxycodone."As medical director in the St. Mary's Hospital emergency room, Martin said he now sees overdoses every day."Six years ago, it was just random nights. It wasn't as consistent of a pattern as we see," Martin said.In Wisconsin, the CDC data still shows car crashes as the leading cause of preventable death over overdoses, but not by much. In Wisconsin, there were 642 fatalities from car crashes and 622 overdose deaths.That's partly the reason that Madison emergency rooms are banding together and announcing a plan to no longer give narcotic prescriptions to anyone with 10 or more pain treatment visits in a year."We've referred to their primary care physician to help manage their pain. We won't continue to keep doing narcotic refills, because when you look at the literature, intermittent narcotic doses is actually one of the worst ways to manage chronic pain," Martin said.Doctors said they know many of those patients aren't really there for pain treatment but rather seeking a prescription for an addiction that's claiming a growing number of lives.
"I think patients think perhaps they can use them recreationally in a safer fashion than heroin and cocaine, but they are definitely just as deadly," Martin said.Right now, the 10-visit cutoff for narcotic prescriptions means 10 visits in each hospital. But since all three Madison hospitals use the same electronic medical record software, they're able to see records from other facilities and use that information when making the decision to prescribe a narcotic.