Opioid Abuse by the Youth
Joseph
Role of Opioid Education for the Youth
Esther Joseph
Miami Regional University
ENC 2201— Report Writing and Research Methods
Research Paper
Dr. Uliana Gancea
April 11, 2020
Opioid Abuse by the Youth
Opioids are substances that act on the opioid receptors so as to produce a morphine like outcome. They are used for pain relief, including anesthesia. They are also used to suppress diarrhoea, replacement therapy for opioid use disorder, suppressing cough as well as for executions in the United States. Opioids apart from being used for medical purposes they are also frequently used for non-medical purposes. When induced they give a euphoric effect and can also be used to prevent withdrawal (Satterley & Anitescu, 2015). In the United States there have been a lot of youths who use opioids for their euphoric effects. Due to their addictive nature, they have seen a lot of youths addicted to the substances which many result to fatal and adverse effects on the substance abuser.
Opioids are responsible for 1.7 deaths in 10, 000 people. Most of these people are young adults between 18 years to 25 years. Due to the rise in the use of this substances there have been introduction of educating the youths about the drugs. This is to create awareness as well as educate the youth on what to expect if they get themselves mixed up with the practice. In this paper we pose the question, what is the role of opioid education to the youth? We will talk about the impact that the program will have on the youths, be it positive or negative (Knaggs, 2019).
Opioids act by binding to opioid receptors, these are found principally in the peripheral and central nervous system as well as the gastrointestinal tract. These receptors mediate both the somatic as well as the psychoactive effects that opioids cause. Opioid drugs include antagonists like naloxegol which are used for opioid induced constipation and partial agonists like the anti diarrhoea drug loperamide (McDONOUGH, 2016). Due to opioids nature of being addictive and might result in fatal overdose, most of them are controlled substances. In the year 2013, between 28 and 38 million people were using opioids illicitly. That is 0.6% to 0.8% of the global population between the ages 15 and 65. In the year 2011, it was estimated that 4 million people in the United States used opioids recreationally and were dependent on them. As of 2015, increased numbers of recreational use and addiction were attributed to over prescription of the medication and inexpensive illicit heroin.
Literature review
The National Institutes of Health has a healing initiative for over 50 million Americans who suffer from chronic pain. Opioids medications are the most common for treating pain although effective and safe non opioid options for pain management are lacking. The used of opioids to treat acute and chronic pain has contributed to approximately 10.3 million people aged 12 years and older in the united states in 2018 who abused opioids (Hubbell & Reid, 2018). In 2018, National Institutes of Health, in consultation with a broad range of stakeholders, identified a set of research that when prioritized will reflect urgent unmet needs across the lifespan.
Areas that show promising scientific opportunity as well as concrete strategies that are very possible of providing durable and rapid solutions to the opioids crisis. Through this initiative, National Institutes of Health supports research to enhance pain management as well as improving treatment for opioid addiction and misuses (McDONOUGH, 2016). With improved treatment, there will be an added positive results rate and more youth will be motivated to go through the process.
The initiative includes research focus areas that are led by 12 National Institutes of Health ICs supporting hundreds of projects that reflect the full spectrum of research from basic science direct to the implementation research. This research serves the overall same purpose as that of opioid education among the youth (Satterley & Anitescu, 2015). They both seek to have a world that is free of opioid dependency and abuse.
It is important to understand that it is not easy for anyone to recover form an addiction and as so is the case with opioid abusers. If it can be rectified in their youth years that will mean that it will be less hard that it would have been if they tried to quit the habit at an older age. Initiatives that help this to happen should be given support by citizens as well as the whole government (Knopf, 2017). In the youth years since one has not used opioids for a long time, there are reversible damages to the brain and body which would only get worse after years of use.
The researches being carried out should also be accompanied by new rules about purchasing of opioids. There should be a better research to find out how to make medicines that lack the components known to give the euphoric feeling in opioid abusers (Pfeiffer, 2019). This means that most of these drugs will need a prescription to access which will surely reduce how much they are abused by the youths.
Method
This study used a meta-analysis approach; the information gathered through this approach from the relevant eligible sources findings used for this study, the results obtained from the various sources summarized when compiling this report. Various scientific studies and journals, to collect the required data, the data then synthesized and compiled. The Studies used in this study entailed the ones that featured a randomized trial method. Whereas different studies were analyzed, the primary focus was on the ones that involved experiments that lasted more than a month. Also, ones that had recorded results before the study and compared the outcomes with the results obtained after that. A case study approach was used to analyze previous works by researchers and the available secondary data. The study’s primary focus was on both qualitative and quantitative data collected from first-hand experiments and observations.
The study used a meta-analysis search strategy on various databases, including but not limited to google scholar, where original papers relating to the study and that investigated opioid education for the youth as a contemporary real-life phenomenon were identified. This approach was preferable because it was not only cost and time effective but also provided an in-depth analysis of the study topic (Paterson et al., 2001). The data collection process took a two-step approach that entailed the identification of credible and eligible sources of information relating to the topic and identified through a filtering process using the study’s keywords (Paterson et al., 2001). The keywords used in the process included; “opioid education,” “youth,”‘’ contemporary real-life phenomenon.’’ After the
