Be advised, we are all miles inside an active battle zone. It’s comprised of officials with the American Medical Association; worldwide pharmaceutical giants; corporate CEOs; government bureaucrats at the local, state and federal level; law enforcement; hospitals and first responders; and friends and coworkers on every jobsite. Recent medical studies of rampant opioid prescriptions put our society as far as twenty years into this conflict. As we’ve heard so many times in military applications, “It doesn’t matter how we got here. It’s how we get out that matters now.” Sales of prescription opioids to pharmacies, hospitals and physician’s offices quadrupled from 2000 to 2010, grossing more than $11 billion in 2012 and resulting in 64,000 fatal overdoses by 2016. It won’t be easy to get out this time.
Opioid pain relievers such as Oxycodone®, Oxycontin®, Hydrocodone®, Fentanyl® fall under the broader category of opiates (including morphine, codeine and heroin). Today’s opioids are a recent class of man-made “opiate-like” pharmaceutical compounds that bond with one or more of the body’s three types of opioid receptors (much like morphine) in order to block pain signals between the body’s sensory nerves at the injury site and the trauma victim’s opioid receptors in the brain. These receptors are also affected by the body’s natural production of five endogenous opioids, the most well-known being endorphins. Today there are nearly a dozen common brand names for synthetic opioids available in the pharmaceutical marketplace, with more likely to be developed to meet future demand. The opioid receptors located throughout our body in the cerebral cortex, the spinal cord and digestive system not only control pain reception, mood, decisions making, and the digestive process, but also have side effects. That includes suppressing the functions of our autonomic nervous system, reducing levels of consciousness, causing convulsions, slowing breathing and in the case of an overdose, stopping completely, causing death.