Opioid use in Australia: have government restrictions avoided the crisis faced in the USA?

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Most of us might be familiar with the term 'the war on drugs'. In the US, it's been waged since the 1970s, when then President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act and declared drug abuse as “public enemy number one.

Most of us might be familiar with the term 'the war on drugs'. In the US, it's been waged since the 1970s, when then President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act and declared drug abuse as “public enemy number one.” But today, it's not so much illicit drugs but prescription medication that the US is fighting, with deaths from prescription opioids reaching crisis levels.

Tighter restrictions on prescription and supply were introduced in 2020 by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, or T-G-A, in a bid to address the potential harm of opioids. He says there ARE now fewer opioids being prescribed under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme - but some people have opted to still access these medications by paying full price.

"The doctors are obviously worried about well about being misinformed by their patients because there was a lot of that going in the last 10 or 15 years, and doctors really rely on a trusting relationship with the patients... But I think the bigger problem is that we've got a tendency in Australia to take a big stick approach to drug issues... and in the prescription space we've also implemented a lot of changes to supply without actually carefully improving the demand management.

Kate Sear is a Professor at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University and Deputy Chair of the Victorian Pain Inquiry."Two in five women live with chronic pain that adversely affects their wellbeing. We know that there are also often differences for women who might be Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, women from LBTQIA+ populations, trans women etc.

 

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