Persuasive Essay On Opioids

When someone goes to the doctor because they are in pain doctors give them opioids also called opiates and narcotics which is a type of pain medication. People that take opioids for a long period of time become dependent on them or addicted and in the long run not good for people due to their side effects. Also, the risk of overdose higher with opioids. There need to be stricter regulations for doctors being able to prescribe these kinds of drugs long term due to that many patients that are prescribed these drugs should not be taking them because the abuse them. People can become not necessarily addicted to opioids but rather dependent on them. “Usually opioid abusers will build a tolerance to the drug so then they will take more of the drug, to continue to get high” (Van den Brink, Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 2006). When people stop using opioids and they have built a dependence they go through withdraws. Some of the withdraw symptoms are not pleasant for the person some of the symptoms include: anxiety, craving for the drug, muscle aches, vomiting, and …show more content…
In 2013 25,000 people died from an overdose of prescribed medicine out of that 25,000 18,000 them died from prescribed opioids. If those people were not prescribed the opioids then they probably wouldn’t have died cutting down that number to only 7,000 deaths. The higher the dose of opioid drug leads to more overdoses. The longer you take the drug the stronger the tolerance becomes and then the higher the dose of the drug the higher the chance of having an overdose. That’s why the common age that people overdose on opioids is from the age 25-64. This is one of the reasons why doctors need regulations on prescribing patients opioid long term because they are too many deaths from people overdosing on these prescribed