Oxycodone use halved after prescription law change
The amount of oxycodone Australians use has almost halved after national changes to packaging and prescribing laws were introduced, a new study has found levels of the opioid in wastewater.
The study analyzed 6,900 samples from more than 50 wastewater treatment plants, to obtain data from 50 per cent of the Australian population, between April 2017 and April 2023.
Rory Verhagen of the University of Queensland found that there was a 45 percent reduction in the amount of oxycodone used between 2019 and 2020.
“Oxycodone use has decreased nationwide from 120 milligrams to 65mg per day per thousand people from August 2019 to December 2020,” Dr. Verhagen said.
“Usage is now stable through 2021 to 2023.”
Dr. Verhagen said the study also looked at fentanyl, and heroin, to find fentanyl use followed a similar pattern to oxycodone, while heroin was changing at the same time.
The decreased use of oxycodone coincides with changes aimed at reducing prescriptions, including new prescribing guidelines and reducing the package size from 20 tablets to 10, to increase warnings in 2020.
“Of course we cannot directly link one policy change to this decrease, but it seems that a combination of these changes has caused a national decrease in the use of oxycodone in the community,” Dr Verhagen said.
Dr Verhagen from the University of Queensland’s Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences, (Provided by: University of Queensland)
He said public awareness could have played a role, including reports about the ongoing opioid crisis in the United States in medical journals and news outlets.
“So people who might have been prescribed oxycodone know about the potential dangers because they’ve been following the news, so they might not take oxycodone,” he said.
The reduction in the amount used is in sharp contrast to the large increase reported in 2017 to 2020, where consumption increased from 78mg per day per 1,000 people to 120mg per day.
Oxycodone is a schedule 8 controlled drug in Australia, and, like opioids, it is used to treat acute and chronic pain, but it carries the risk of addiction and death, especially from overdosing. equity is misused.
Medicine is very dangerous
Opioids are the most common type of drug associated with unintentional drug-related deaths, accounting for half of the 926 deaths in 2022, according to the latest Annual Overdose Report compiled by Pennington Center.
Since 2018, the number of unintentional opioid-related deaths has increased by 15.9 percent, while the number of patients prescribed opioids has decreased by 13.5 percent over the same period, the report said.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has estimated that by 2022-23 around 2 per cent of Australians have used prescription opioids for illegal or non-medical purposes, and around half 1 percent reported using heroin.
Addiction expert and chair of the RACGP Addiction Special Interest Group, Hester Wilson, said overall it was good to see levels of use reduced.
Dr. Wilson said that while opiates had benefits, they were a very dangerous drug that could have serious side effects, including addiction.
“Some people start to lose control of opioid use four to seven days after starting,” he said.
“They start to realize that they need a bigger budget, they start to realize that they have a passion, they often don’t realize it until it’s strong.”
Dr. Wilson said that although some people will not have a problem stopping their use, the treatment requires continuous evaluation and to make sure that the use of drugs benefits the patients.
“Making sure we’re reassessing and evaluating and making sure they’re achieving their goals, which is better performance, getting on with life, going to work, mowing the lawn, playing with the kids they see,” he said.
“For the people that we continue to give long-term opiates, and it’s appropriate, I really want to lower that dose to a lower level … and try to look at other options.”
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