Killing Pain: Benzo 'Boost' Can Be Deadly
Published: Feb 25, 2014 | Updated: Feb 26, 2014
Only Michael Moore knew the combination to the safe in his bedroom closet. He had locked up his prescriptions for chronic pain and insomnia so his two young children could not get into them.
As it turned out, it was Moore, 49, who needed the protection.
On Nov. 3, 2012, Moore, a computer analyst from Milwaukee who had suffered a serious knee injury years earlier, died of an accidental overdose. When police opened the safe they found hundreds of two types of prescription pills: opioids and benzodiazepines./.../
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Pain Management
Killing Pain: Script by Script
Published: Feb 27, 2014 | Updated: Feb 28, 2014
Primary care doctors wrote about 53 million benzodiazepine prescriptions in 2013, roughly four times the number written by psychiatrists, a group that penned 13 million benzo scripts.
Nurse practitioners and physician assistants were close behind with 11 million prescriptions for the drugs, according to data obtained by MedPage Today and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
In 2013, non-doctors wrote 30 million opioid prescriptions, compared with 92 million written by primary care doctors that year, according to data provided by IMS Health, a drug market research firm.
In 2010, the most recent year for which data were available, 30% of the 16,651 people who died of an opioid overdose also had taken a benzodiazepine, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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