* AP…

Dr. Mary Meengs remembers the days, a couple of decades ago, when pharmaceutical salespeople would drop into her family practice in Chicago, eager to catch a moment between patients so they could pitch her a new drug.

Now living in Humboldt County, Calif., Meengs is taking a page from the pharmaceutical industry’s playbook with an opposite goal in mind: to reduce the use of prescription painkillers.

Meengs, medical director at the Humboldt Independent Practice Association, is one of 10 California doctors and pharmacists funded by Obama-era federal grants to persuade medical colleagues in Northern California to help curb opioid addiction by altering their prescribing habits.

* But is the pendulum starting to swing too far the other way? The I-Team looks at new restrictions on opioid prescriptions…

Jenni Grover, an ambassador for the U.S. Pain Foundation and a chronic pain advocate, said the stories of desperation she hears are heartbreaking. She said patients tell her they’re being treated as if they are criminal drug addicts, and doctors are abandoning them because of new regulations and possible scrutiny by the medical community and federal regulators. […]

State and federal leaders, as well as medical practitioners and other providers, are using multiple strategies to address the opioid crisis; curtailing the opioid supply is one of them. Drug abuse experts say between 2001 and 2011 there was a huge increase in prescriptions for drugs such as morphine, codeine and hydrocodone. They say these pills flowed too freely to the wrong kind of patient, causing unnecessary and deadly addictions and helping fuel the drug epidemic. […]

New analysis from the National Conference of State Legislatures shows 24 state governments taking action.

Most of the legislation limits first-time prescriptions to seven days. Some states are also setting dosage limits. As of right now, Illinois has no mandated restrictions.

The president of the Illinois State Medical Society said the group will continue to lobby against regulation.

But, Dr. Kern Singh, a spinal surgeon with Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush University Medical Center, said the reality is it’s very difficult to get insurance coverage for the non-narcotic, safer alternative treatments because they are so expensive.

Working with other pain specialists at Rush, he said they have created an effective approach to surgical pain that uses fewer opioids, but is frustrated because most insurance companies refuse to cover the safer, more expensive medication.

* The addiction problem is all too real…

Last year, according to the New York Times, more Americans died of drug overdoses than were killed in the entire Vietnam War.

* From a press release…

While the nation’s opioid epidemic has been portrayed primarily as an issue for white suburbanites, African Americans in Chicago and other cities in the Midwest are also significantly affected by opioid use but receive little attention, according to a new report by the Chicago Urban League’s Research and Policy Center.

The report, titled “Whitewashed: The African American Opioid Crisis,” notes that the African American death rate from opioid overdose in 2015 was higher than the general population in five states, including four in the Midwest: Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, and Wisconsin. The African American death rate from opioid overdose was also higher in West Virginia and Washington, D.C.

In Chicago in 2016, the African American death rate involving fentanyl, heroin and other opioids was 56% higher than the white death rate (39.3% vs 25.1%). While Black people make up approximately 32% of the city’s population, they accounted for nearly half (48.5%) of all opioid deaths. Death rates were highest in Black communities on the South and West sides, with Austin suffering the highest death rate of all community areas.

The report also highlights that African Americans are disproportionately arrested for drugs, at nearly three times the rate of whites, while approaches to the opioid epidemic have focused more on treatment. […]

* Chicago ranks lowest in the Midwest for medication-assisted treatment capacity and third worse among major cities.
* Despite making up just 15% of Illinois’ population, African Americans account for nearly a quarter of opioid overdose deaths in the state.
* In 2016, the overdose death rate for African Americans in Illinois more than doubled, climbing 132% and growing faster than any other racial group over a three-year period.
* African Americans accounted for nearly half of all opioid overdose deaths in Chicago in 2016.

* With so many people addicted in this country, rehab scams are everywhere…

(T)he $35 billion rehab industry is increasingly being exploited by individuals who are taking advantage of those who need help the most. (For an excellent glimpse into these issues, the 2015 documentary The Business of Recovery lays out a chilling case for a broken, ailing, desperately in-need-of-its-own-rehab rehab system.)

* However, there is an alternative for at least some of that pain treatment…

Illinois’ medical community has been somewhat reluctant to publicly embrace medical marijuana in the two years since the state’s first dispensaries opened.

But some physicians say the matter has taken on added urgency as the nation sinks deeper into an opioid crisis involving both prescription drugs, and heroin and its synthetic analogs. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports there are 40 prescription opioid deaths a day, Illinois health officials have warned it’s the most dangerous public health issue facing the state and President Donald Trump has declared opioid addiction a public health emergency. […]

Though Bush-Joseph speaks for himself — not for Rush University Medical Center where he is a professor, and not for the Chicago White Sox or Bulls, with whom he has worked — his word as a leading arthroscopic surgeon carries some weight. After severe injury or surgery, he concedes patients typically need opioids like Percocet and Vicodin for a month or two. But after that, he believes patients should have potential access to marijuana as another longer-term alternative. […]

The doctors support a new bill before the Illinois General Assembly that would expand the state medical marijuana program to allow cannabis to be used by any patient who qualifies for use of opioids. Such a change could vastly expand the program, which now has only about 27,000 participants. Currently there are about 40 specific conditions, including cancer and AIDS, that qualify sufferers to apply to use medical marijuana.

If passed into law, the new bill would allow those who qualify to receive a one-year marijuana card, without the fingerprinting and criminal background check now required. Approval would be expedited to 14 days, rather than the two to three months it can now take.

* Related…

* ‘It never really leaves you.’ Opioids haunt users’ recovery: It’s hard to say whether businessman Kyle Graves hit rock bottom when he shot himself in the ankle so emergency room doctors would feed his opioid habit or when he broke into a safe to steal his father’s cancer pain medicine. For straight-talking ex-trucker Jeff McCoy, it was when he grabbed a gun and threatened to blow his brains out if his mother didn’t hand over his fentanyl patches.

* Opioid addiction treatments face off in US trial: Both drugs had high relapse rates and there were overdoses, including fatal ones, in the experiment in 570 adults. The study , published Tuesday in the journal Lancet, is the first to compare the two drugs in the United States, where an opioid addiction epidemic has doctors and policymakers deeply divided over treatment strategies.