Opioid epidemic hits close to home
LAS VEGAS (KSNV News3LV) — If you stand in a room full of ten people, one will be addicted to opioids. One in ten Americans struggles with opioids and Chris Boutte is one of them.
“I was literally just taking handfuls to work and after those were out that’s when I started finding drug dealers,” Boutte tells us.
His addiction to pain pills started like thousands of other Nevadans, with a prescription. After a C section, the mother of his son was prescribed two hundred pills. He is now sober and helps other addicts both in person and on his YouTube page.
Every state is touched by opioid addiction, few like Nevada where any number of statistics are alarming.
RELATED | Officials say Trump's opioid emergency won't mean new money
According to the state’s own numbers. In 2013, Nevada had the second most hydrocodone and oxycodone prescriptions in the nation, the fourth highest overdose death rate. That same year almost twenty percent of high schoolers in our state said they used prescription drugs without a prescription.
The problem is massive.
President Donald Trump has declared it a Public Health Emergency, ordering Congress to come up with a plan and diverting some grant money to addiction treatment.
According to UMC’s Chief of Staff Dr. Dale Carrison the solution is to stop overprescribing.
“You have to address peoples pain. So we address pain and have an epidemic. But on the other hand, the pill makers flooded the market," he told us.
Do you consider the opioid epidemic to be a national emergency? Click here, to vote.
