Not content to take away New Yorkers' outdoor smoking privileges and million-calorie mega-sodas, Mayor Bloomberg announced an initiative yesterday intended to curb prescription pill abuse, by limiting emergency room patients to a three-day supply of painkillers. Will we soon have no way left to self destruct?
The new initiative comes after a city-commissioned task force noted a significant increase in documented painkiller addiction over the past few years, with researchers finding 40,000 New Yorkers exhibiting a dependency on the drugs. They also found a 30 percent rise in accidental painkiller overdoses between 2005 and 2010. Previously, city hospitals had been allotting patients seven days worth of prescription pills like OxyContin and Vicodin, but many doctors say that's more than necessary.
"Most acute pain—from an ankle injury to a headache, whatever you’d like to pick—lasts two to three days," Dr. Lewis Nelson, a member of the prescription pill task force and a physician at NYU Langone Medical Center, told the Post. Bloomberg also says he wants to cut down on prescription pill addiction to limit drug crime, noting pain pill-related violence such as the shooting over painkillers at a Long Island pharmacy in 2011 that left four people dead. But if you really think you can't survive surgery without zoning out on a week's worth of Oxy, the three-day rule doesn't apply to private hospitals, and non-emergency room doctors can still prescribe you pills at their discretion. Or, you could probably just visit this guy in prison.
