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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Dreamstime For those who have severe chronic pain, the advantage of OxyContin over other prescription painkillers is that it lasts for 12 hours. For those who like to get high on opioids, the great thing about OxyContin is that if you crush it and snort it, or mix it with water and inject it, you get 12 hours’ worth of oxycodone all at once. “So basically they get a really big high,” Bob Jamison, a professor of anesthesiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, tells Popular Science.Those injectors and snorters have plenty of company. Prescription opioids—drugs that work similarly to opium, including OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet and others—are the number-one cause of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. That includes overdoses from illegal drugs such as heroin and cocaine. In 2010, prescription opioids accounted for 44 percent of all U.S. overdose deaths. It’s a huge problem and drug companies are turning to a solution they know very well: chemistry.Purdue Pharma first introduced OxyContin in the 1990s. The new pill combined the well-known pain reliever oxycodone with Purdue’s own long-acting formula, which slowly released oxycodone once a pill made its way into the digestive system. Because swallowed OxyContin didn’t provide a big, front-loaded hit of opioid, Purdue advertised it as nearly addiction-proof, Fortune reported. It turned out to be almost exactly the opposite.In 2010, Purdue quietly introduced a new formula that made OxyContin pills weirdly difficult to crush or dissolve in water, hoping to undercut the ways people had discovered they could get a super-sized opioid hit from long-acting OxyContin. Three years later, studies are just beginning to show that crush-resistant chemistry does seem to reduce OxyContin abuse. Whether it reduces drug abuse overall is another question. Preliminary findings suggest those who used to abuse OxyContin are simply replacing it with other prescriptions or with heroin.Meanwhile, researchers are working on several other ways of making painkillers physically more difficult to abuse. Nothing else is on the market yet, but the experts I talked to said to expect companies to try. “It’s a booming industry,” Jamison says.If drug abusers respond to new
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