OPIOID CRISIS:
MOUNTING HIGH-RISK OPIOID USE AND INFECTIVE DISEASE (HEP C) INCIDENCE IN RESPONSE TO AMERICAN MEDICINE’S SUBSTITUTE OPIOID “TREATMENT” – KENTUCKY AND INDIANA
By Clark Miller
Published May 22, 2019
Updated April 13, 2021
The more deaths mount, the more pressure mounts to divert public healthcare resources to the unvalidated medical model provision of addictive, diverted and abused substitute opioids.
But analysis of the evidence establishes that use of the OD death-reversing drug naloxone – its reduction of deaths acting and measured directly, unlike presumed benefit from OST – directly accounts for all apparent changes (= decreases) in opioid-related overdose deaths. This result holds when results are available on a local level (e.g. here, here, here, and here) and when national data are examined.
Attributing benefit to OST requires evidence of reduced high-risk use of opioids
As described in detail in this, this, and other posts, that is the mechanism by which OST could possibly provide benefit. When outcomes are critically analyzed, the evidence points consistently to provision of the medical model fix, “treatment”, for problem opioid use worsening, not protective for, high-risk use and associated harms including opioid-related mortality. Because high-risk use, measured as non-lethal overdose incidence (eliminating the confounding, established effects of expanding naloxone use and campaigns) has increased nationally and consistently in multiple locales where data are available as dose of the medical cure increases.
As explained and established by multiple lines of evidence in this new post, emergence over past years of the potent opioid fentanyl in street economies of illicit opioid use does not qualify those invalidating results – fentanyl cannot explain away the failure of increased provision of the medical “treatment” to reduce high-risk opioid use.
An important, direct measure of high-risk use of opioids
is incidence of opioid injection-related infective disease, like endocarditis.
NEW EVIDENCE BELOW
In a variety of settings and nationally, high-risk opioid use as measured by non-lethal overdose incidence has worsened with increasing provision of the medical model fix, against prediction if OST provides benefit. Another, independent measure of high-risk use – incidence of opioid- and injection-related infective diseases including endocarditis – also shows an OST-invalidating pattern of increase in response to large increases over decades of provision of opioid substitution medicine.
Think about it – incidence of infective diseases caused by injection of opioids.
That use of opioids is high-risk. If OST provides benefit to at-risk users, the mechanism is by reducing risk and associated problems related to opioid use.
Trends of decreased incidence of an injection-related infectious disease could be attributed to a variety of factors including: changes in public health, prevention, or medical interventions; decrease in high-risk opioid use including use by injection; clean needle exchanges; behavioral health treatments; others. Identifying the factor(s) any decreases could be confidently attributed to would require that multiple congruent, well-designed studies and other lines of evidence point to those factors and not others.
Increases in incidence, like those we’re seeing, are different. If increases of significant magnitude occur over the same time period that an intervention, like the medical OST fix, hypothesized to be a “treatment” or protective factor has also increased, then that constitutes strong evidence against that intervention as beneficial in reducing high-risk use.
As we would predict from everything we know about problem substance use and the failure of medical approaches to provide benefit for that non-medical problem, those diseases are increasing in prevalence.
That’s been true in Ontario, Canada and in Columbus, Ohio.
In Franklin County Ohio –
In Franklin County, Ohio, cases of drug-injection-related infectious endocarditis, a measure of injection drug use, have skyrocketed over the years 2012 – 2017.
Specifically, the increase in incidence of those cases increased 436 percent, most of that increase attributable to use of heroin by injection.
Investigators found that overall admissions for infective endocarditis at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center increased 101% from 2012 to 2017, with most of the increase coming from the 436% jump in drug-related cases. The research, which was presented at the American College of Cardiology (ACC) 2019 Annual Scientific Sessions in New Orleans, LA, found that most of the cases of endocarditis related to drug use involved heroin.
Significant, extended increases in medical provision of buprenorphine and methadone OST should necessarily have resulted in the opposite outcome – decreases over the same time period of high-risk opioid use . . . unless . . . as is generally and predictably the case, the provision of a medical model “treatment”, unsupported and indicated against by research evidence for an entirely non-medical condition – compulsive problem opioid use – has predictably resulted in a worsening of an iatrogenic lethal opioid crisis rather than providing benefit.
Additional evidence points to the same effect occurring nationally. In response to large increases in provision of the medical OST fix for high-risk opioid use, over decades –
– nationally incidence of opioid-injection-related diseases have increased as well, the opposite of predicted if OST is providing benefit.
New evidence in Kentucky –
a worsening Hepatitis C outbreak is attributed to high-risk opioid use, by injection –
Constituting a measure of worsening high-risk opioid use despite steady, significant increases in provision of the medical treatment fix for high-risk opioid use.
There are signs of a similar pattern in Indiana.
These consistently accumulating results – high-risk opioid use increasing in response to increasing provision of the medical model “treatment” for high-risk opioid use – predictably invalidate and expose the fabricated evidence base for the publicly-funded medical fix for the non-medical condition of compulsive substance use.
For rates of opioid injection-related infectious disease, as with increasing rates of another measure of high-risk opioid use – non-lethal overdose – as provision of the medical cure increases, predictable, invalidating outcomes and patterns are emerging.
