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Young athletes, in general, are less likely than their nonparticipating peers to use illicit substances like cocaine or LSD, said lead author Philip Veliz of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “What was surprising were the decreasing trends in both lifetime prevalence of nonmedical use of prescription opioids and heroin use among athletes and nonathletes during a period when the prescribing of opioid medication increased,” Veliz told Reuters Health by email. Past research has found that athletes have a higher than average likelihood of being exposed to opioids as a result of injuries. Although that puts them at risk of abusing the drugs, little is known about whether it also raises the risk of using heroin, the authors write in Pediatrics.
The researchers studied eighteen groups of eighth and tenth graders participating in the Monitoring the Future study between 1997 and 2014. More than 191,682 kids reported their sports or exercise participation over the previous year and whether they had ever used heroin or “narcotics other than heroin, such as methadone, opium, morphine, codeine, Demerol, Vicodin, OxyContin, and Percocet . . . without a doctor telling you to take them.” Overall, about 7 percent of kids said they had ever used opioids without a prescription and 2 percent had used heroin. Both proportions decreased over time, however. In 1997-1999, 10 percent said they had abused opioids, compared with 5 percent in 2012-2014. Similarly, 2.3 percent reported ever having used heroin during the first period, compared with 1 percent in the second period.
Half of teens said they had been involved in sports and exercise almost every day, with 39 percent participating once a week at most and 8 percent not participating in sports at all. Playing sports appeared to have a protective effect, researchers said. Among kids who played no sports, 11 percent said they had used opioids without a prescription, compared with 8 percent of those playing sports at most once a week and 7 percent of those playing sports every day. “First, since athletes need to be in shape to participate in sport at an optimal level, they may avoid problematic drug use to be able to perform at a high level in their sport of choice,” Veliz said. “Second, since athletes are embedded in a social context (i.e., sport) with both prosocial peers and adults, they will conform to certain behaviors that will discourage illicit drug use like nonmedical prescription opioid use and heroin.” Sports also provide structure in daily life, and there is usually some adult present watching these young athletes at all times, he said.
Athletes in high-contact sports that are high injury and hypermasculine may be more likely to self-medicate with opioids or try heroin, he added. “Rates of both nonmedical use of prescription opioids and heroin use are low among both 8th and 10th graders (compared to alcohol and marijuana use),” Veliz said. “However, parents of athletes should be concerned with nonmedical opioid use due to athletes’ increased risk for injury and management of pain within their participation in physical activity or sport.” “Nonmedical opioid use has become a huge problem in recent years,” so the results of this study are great news, said Joseph Palamar of the department of population health at New York University Langone Medical Center, who was not part of the new study. “Almost a quarter of these teens that have used opioids nonmedically 40 or more times report lifetime heroin use so if we can't prevent a teen from trying opioids we must try our hardest to at least prevent continued use,” Palamar told Reuters Health by email.
Teens who play sports less likely to say they’ve done heroin
It is a health crisis with tentacles reaching across the social spectrum. Lorain County, in the state of Ohio, is mostly suburban and middle-class, with a large rural hinterland. Its population is only 305,000 but for the last three years, the number of fatal opiate overdoses has hovered at around 65. This year it only took six months to reach that figure. Avon Lake is the county's wealthiest community - an upmarket suburb of the city of Cleveland. Here, on the shores of Lake Erie, the scourge of opiates - prescription pills and street heroin - is tearing at the fabric of a tightly-knit neighbourhood.
The addict
Mason Butler is smoking in the garden. The cicadas are close to deafening, Mason has hardly slept and his mother, Marnie, has arrived to drive him to rehab. This will be his seventh attempt at getting clean. "Every time, you have to have hope," he says. "But when it doesn't work out you get more discouraged than the last time. It kind of sucks when you just feel like a chronic relapser…" Like so many American heroin addicts, Butler first got hooked on pain medication. At high school he was a wrestler, and the doctor prescribed an opiate drug for his injuries. "I took it the first time, and I was like, 'That's it.' It hit the mark. That was the high I was looking for and I chased it from the age of 16. Now I'm 26…"
Although he claims he is determined to quit, Butler has arranged to meet a heroin dealer on his way to rehab, to score a final hit. Marnie is not fully aware of her son's plan until she finds herself waiting for him outside a fast food restaurant off the highway. "I didn't realise," she says. "It's very stressful - I just want to get him there. And it's nerve-wracking because I didn't bring the nalaxone kit," she says.
Nalaxone is a prescription medicine that reverses an opiate overdose, and is credited with saving thousands of lives. Ohio's emergency services carry it, and it is available in pharmacies. In Lorain County, like much of the US, the spike in fatalities has been caused by fentanyl, a synthetic opiate pain reliever dozens of times more powerful than heroin. It is the drug that killed Prince. Drug dealers are cutting it with heroin - with or without the user's knowledge. Back in the car, Butler shoots up the heroin he has scored. Marnie is deeply upset - it's the first time she has seen this. An hour later, he is pushing the buzzer at the door of the rehab facility. "I'm here to get admitted," he slurs into the intercom. "Oh, wonderful, come on in," says a bright, disembodied voice.
The cop
I agree, let's ban liberals....Let's ban stupidity.
Let's ban stupidity.
This government analysis also reveals that the number of drug overdoses from opioids – including morphine, codeine and heroin – has quadrupled since 1999. In 2014, 28,000 people died from opioid overdoses. The analysis explained that the CDC calculated overdose deaths by collecting data on natural, semi-synthetic and synthetic opioids – including methadone. “Using this method, in 2014 there were almost 19,000 deaths involving prescription opioids, equivalent to about 52 deaths per day,” the CDC analysis stated. “This is an increase from approximately 16,000 in 2013.”
The bottom line, the analysis stated, is: “Regardless of the analysis strategy used, prescription opioids continue to be involved in more overdose deaths than any other drug, and all the numbers are likely to underestimate the true burden given the large proportion of overdose deaths where the type of drug is not listed on the death certificate.
“The findings show that two distinct but interconnected trends are driving America’s opioid overdose epidemic: a 15-year increase in deaths from prescription opioid overdoses, and a recent surge in illicit opioid overdoses driven mainly by heroin and illegally-made fentanyl,” it stated. “Both of these trends worsened in 2014,” the analysis concluded.
Record Drug Overdoses in U.S. in 2014 – 28,000 Deaths from Opioids
The six men, all hailing from Ghajar, an Israeli town straddling the Lebanese border, allegedly ran a cross-border drug and weapons smuggling network with operatives of the Shi’ite group. A joint operation between the Israeli military, the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency and national police saw them arrested throughout September, suspected of smuggling explosive devices and drugs, conspiring with and gathering intelligence for Hezbollah, and planning attacks on Israeli civilians.
After explosives were found by an Israeli farmer in an orchard in a nearby town, a two-month investigation led authorities to the group in Ghajar. Indictments were filed on Oct. 6 although no court date has yet been announced. (Ghajar’s status has long been contentious. The area came under Israeli control when Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria during the 1967 Six Day War. Some pre-1967 maps place Ghajar in Syria and some in Lebanon, and the exact location of the international border is in dispute. Since 2000 the town has been split between Lebanese and Israeli territory. Most of the residents are Alawi, the offshoot of Shi’ism that is also practiced by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.)
According to Shin Bet, “a number of cases” of smuggling routes between Hezbollah’s southern Lebanon stronghold and northern Israel have been uncovered in recent years. Established drug smuggling routes are also appropriated to smuggle weapons. In 2012, just over 44 pounds of C4 was found in one such operation. Several Israeli Arabs in Nazareth and Ghajar were arrested in connection with the discovery. C4 is a powerful explosive and frequent weapon of choice in terrorist attacks – reportedly including suicide bombings carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL).
The alleged leader of the Ghajar group, named as Diab Sa’ad Jemil Kahmouz, is the son of a known drug dealer and Hezbollah operative on the Lebanese side of the border. Sa’ad Kahmouz fled to Lebanon from Ghajar some years ago. According to the investigation, the Kahmouz father and son corresponded via encoded email about operations in Israel including plans to bomb a plant near the coastal city of Haifa, and a busy bus stop used as a connection point for soldiers traveling throughout the country. Moving weapons is a decidedly more complex operation than moving drugs, but both require the cooperation of accomplices on the Israeli side of the border.
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