Perspectives: Shortages Of Opioids Will Be Harmful To Terminally Ill Patients; Treat Addiction Like Any Other Life-Threatening Disease

Stat: The Looming Shortage Of Injectable Opioids Could Harm Cancer Patients
Most doctors and health policy experts these days are focused on the overabundance of pills fueling the opioid crisis gripping the United States. Cancer doctors like me lie awake at night worrying about the looming shortage of injectable opioids that we need to treat our in-pain and dying patients. (Tara Soumerai, 5/21)

The New York Times: Treat Addiction Like Cancer
Two years ago, I spent a week in Houston helping my stepbrother while he underwent treatment for Stage 4 lymphoma at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. I sat with him while a nurse cleaned his chemo port and made records of her work, to keep his medical team updated. I accompanied him for the blood tests that determined his readiness for the next treatment. I stayed by his bed as his stem cells were harvested for a transplant, one of the cutting-edge, evidence-based therapies that ultimately saved his life. Around the same time, I was helping my 22-year-old daughter, who struggled with alcohol and drug addiction. The contrast between the two experiences was stark. While my stepbrother received a doctor’s diagnosis, underwent a clearly defined treatment protocol and had his expenses covered by insurance, there was no road map for my daughter. (Laura Hilgers, 5/19)

The New York Times: America’s 150-Year Opioid Epidemic
After the death of her father, a prominent hotel owner in Seattle, Ella Henderson started taking morphine to ease her grief. She was 33 years old, educated and intelligent, and she frequented the upper reaches of Seattle society. But her “thirst for morphine” soon “dragged her down to the verge of debauchery,” according to a newspaper article in 1877 titled “A Beautiful Opium Eater.” After years of addiction, she died of an overdose. In researching opium addiction in late-19th-century America, I’ve come across countless stories like Henderson’s. What is striking is how, aside from some Victorian-era moralizing, they feel so familiar to a 21st-century reader: Henderson developed an addiction at a vulnerable point in her life, found doctors who enabled it and then self-destructed. She was just one of thousands of Americans who lost their lives to addiction between the 1870s and the 1920s. The late-19th-century opiate epidemic was nearly identical to the one now spreading across the United States. (Clinton Lawson, 5/19)