Florida‘s medical examiners recently reported that prescription medicines caused more deaths in 2008 than illicit drugs. The medical examiners also reported sharp increases in deaths caused by prescription tranquilizers and painkillers, such as Oxycodone and hydrocodone.
The results of the year-end report weren’t surprising. Since the middle of last year, physicians, pharmacists and law enforcement officials have warned of a near-epidemic of deadly prescription medicine abuse. In 2005, the Medical Examiners Commission began reporting the drugs discovered in bodies subject to autopsies. The percentage of decedents with at least one drug in their bodies has increased each year; to 53 percent last year.
“The vast majority” (4,924) of the 8,556 drug-related deaths studied last year by the state’s medical examiners involved the presence of more than one drug, according to the 2008 report. The presence of at least one prescription drug caused the death of 2,184 people last year.
To put the scale of those numbers in perspective, consider: There were 2,983 deaths on Florida’s roads last year; 1,169 of those fatalities were alcohol-related. Prescription drugs caused more deaths than alcohol-related crashes in Florida.
Of particular concern: Death-related occurrences of both benzodiazepines and oxycodone were up by more than 20 percent in 2008 compared with 2007. The drugs that caused the most deaths in Florida: oxycodone (941), benzodiazepines (929), methadone (693), cocaine (648), alcohol (489), morphine (300), hydrocodone (270).
This year, the Legislature finally passed a law that calls for creating an electronic database to monitor the prescription and sale of certain painkillers and tranquilizers. The database should help investigators track the worst offenders once it is operational next year, but even proponents of the law concede it was watered down.
Other initiatives are likely to be necessary because the personal and societal problems associated with the misuse of prescription drugs aren’t getting better.
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