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The Deadly Prescription Drug Epidemic in Philadelphia Alan Miceli
I
t only takes a couple of numbers to describe in gruesome detail the illegal prescription drug epidemic in Philadelphia. In 2014, 248 people in the city were murdered, mostly by gun violence. But in that same year more than twice as many of the city’s residents—655, to be exact—died from accidental drug overdoses. And many of the 248 homicides, by the way, were drug-related.
Gary Tuggle, special agent in charge of the Philadelphia Division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), says more people in our area die from accidental drug overdoses than traffic accidents. “This is the worst drug crisis in the history of this country,” Tuggle told Philadelphia Medicince. The vast majority of people who get hooked don’t have police records before their 18 Philadelphia Medicine : Spring 2016
addictions. They often became dependent while taking legally-prescribed pain medication after, for example, a surgery. When they can no longer get the prescriptions from their doctor, they start buying the drugs on the street, a very expensive process. People then often turn to heroin, because it’s cheaper. “Illegal prescription drugs are now a feeder system to our current heroin epidemic,” Tuggle said. “Eight out of 10 new heroin users report first using and abusing prescription opioids before transitioning to heroin.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that people addicted to pain killers are 40 times more likely to become heroin addicts. Tuggle has seen three drug epidemics in his lifetime. The first one was the Vietnam War-era heroin epidemic. The second—the crack epidemic in the 1980s—he witnessed while working as a young police officer in Baltimore—“highly addictive, a lot of violence, extremely destructive.” But he says the current heroin epidemic dwarfs the others because of the feeder system. “The prescription drugs are a bridge to heroin.” Before prescription drugs, Tuggle said, Philadelphia’s heroin problem