by STEVE and ELAINE POZYCKI in the Bernardsville News
EDITOR: Guidelines recently issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) take direct aim at the over-prescribing of opiate-based painkillers, urging primary care doctors to try alternatives such as physical therapy, exercise and over-the-counter pain medications first.
Underlying these strong recommendations to prescribe opiate-based painkillers, such as Oxycodone and Vicadin, sparingly is that the over-prescribing of these highly addictive drugs is the primary cause of our epidemic of addiction, both to these pills and to heroin, their illegal street cousin – an epidemic that has become the leading cause of accidental death in the United States and in New Jersey, taking nearly 30,000 lives in 2014.