The State of Israel is the largest per capita consumer of opioids, The Jerusalem Post reported Sunday, July 21, in a detailed story about the growing catastrophe in the country’s healthcare system.
According to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in 2021, more than a million Americans have died from overdoses of opioids – synthetic painkillers purchased with a doctor’s prescription. We are talking about fentanyl, which is 100 times more powerful than morphine, oxycodone, hydrochlorone and many other drugs. After that, the Israeli Ministry of Health began to expect this problem to appear in the Jewish state in the coming years.
About 25 years ago, pharmaceutical and medical companies began aggressively promoting opioid painkillers, claiming that they effectively relieve pain and are not addictive. The latter claim turned out to be false. Opioid painkillers are highly addictive, but Israel does not even keep track of deaths from these drugs, since the official cause of death for opioid addicts is organ failure, seizures, heart attack, or stroke, without specifying what caused them.
One of the most notorious pharmaceutical companies for its involvement in the US “opioid disaster” is Purdue Pharma, which is owned by the Sackler family – it was the company that promoted the addictive drug OxyContin and is now defending itself against numerous lawsuits from victims of the drug. Tel Aviv University’s medical school was called the “Sackler School” for decades, but it dropped the sponsors’ names from its name because of the scandal.
The Parliamentary Health Committee has held several meetings on the issue of opioid addiction. It has reported that although much of the increase in opioid use is among patients with low socioeconomic status, wealthy people are also addicted. The committee has called for the development of treatment programs for drug addicts based on the experience of other countries.
It was only in 2022 that the Health Ministry, despite pressure from pharmaceutical companies, was forced to change the labels on opioid drugs, indicating that they were addictive. However, no special regulations, no time limits for taking them, and no oversight were introduced. According to Professor Pinchas Dannon, chief psychiatrist at the Herzog Geriatric Medical Center in Jerusalem, any doctor can prescribe synthetic painkillers to patients: they are prescribed after operations, they are prescribed to people with severe pain. However, no one checks whether the patient took these drugs, whether he gave them to anyone, whether he took one or several at once, or whether he continues to take opioid painkillers.
Opioids are relatively cheap, they are included in the “basket of drugs” and health insurance companies do not pay much attention to them. Only now, under threat of lawsuits from patients and relatives of patients who died from overdoses, is the Israeli health system beginning to pay attention to the opioid problem.