A New Drug Ten Times Stronger Than Vicodin Is Coming
LatestDespite America’s renewed heroin epidemic that’s picked off famous folks like Philip Seymour Hoffman and non-famous folks for years, someone thought it was a great idea to create Zohydro, an opiate that’s even more powerful than Vicodin. Prescription pills like these open a dangerous door for people who become addicted to opiate pills and eventually turn to heroin when their pill habit becomes too expensive to continue. So, yeah, I feel like Zohydro is a bad idea.
“One capsule will pack enough hydrocodone to kill a child. An adult lacking a tolerance to opioids could overdose from taking just two capsules,” Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the President of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing wrote in the Huffington Post. “It will kill people as soon as it’s released,” he added.
Yup, that’s pretty much what I was thinking. But who cares about public safety, Zohydro — which kind of sounds like a marijuana strain, doesn’t it? — may be available as early as March, reports The Wire. The pill’s intended purpose will be to reduce chronic and severe pain for people suffering from cancer or arthritis, but I’m sure there’s some street pharmacist who fancies himself a contemporary Stringer Bell, and he’s rubbing his hands together in anticipation right now.
The Center for Disease Control says that Americans can’t even keep their addiction in check with the opiates we already have on the market like Oxycotin and Vicodin.
… “the number of U.S. drug poisoning deaths involving any opioid analgesic more than quadrupled” between 1999 and 2010, jumping from 4,030 to 16,651. And opioid analgesics factored in to 43 percent of drug poisoning deaths in 2010, compared to 24 percent from 1999.
It’s like New York in the 1970s. But don’t worry, the drug company behind Zohydro promised to put a warning label on the bottle.
Image via Ariwasabi/Shutterstock.