VA’s opiate overload feeds veterans’ addictions, overdose deaths

VA’s opiate overload feeds veterans’ addictions, overdose deaths
Aaron Glantz
CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
September 30, 2013

Before dawn, a government van picked up paratrooper Jeffrey Waggoner for the five-hour drive to a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in southern Oregon. His orders: detox from a brutal addiction to painkillers.

He had only the clothes on his back, his watch, an MP3 player and a two-page pain contract the Army made him sign, a promise to get clean.

But instead of keeping Waggoner away from his vice, medical records show the VA hospital in Roseburg kept him so doped up that he could barely stay awake. Then, inexplicably, the VA released him for the weekend with a cocktail of 19 prescription medications, including 12 tablets of highly addictive oxycodone.

Three hours later, Waggoner, 32, was dead of a drug overdose, slumped in a heap in front of his room at the Sleep Inn motel.

“As a parent, you’d want to know how this happened to your child,” said his father, Greg Waggoner. “You send your child to a hospital to get well, not to die.”

Jeffrey Waggoner’s end and easy access to the narcotics that killed him have become tragically common, The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
read more here

Running a war on drugs no win for those we send

A fog of drugs and war
By KIM MURPHY
Los Angeles Times
Published: April 8, 2012
SEATTLE

U.S. Air Force pilot Patrick Burke's day started in the cockpit of a B-1 bomber near the Persian Gulf and proceeded across nine time zones as he ferried the aircraft home to South Dakota.

Every four hours during the 19-hour flight, Burke swallowed a tablet of Dexedrine, the prescribed amphetamine known as "go pills."

After landing, he went out for dinner and drinks with a fellow crewman. They were driving back to Ellsworth Air Force Base when Burke began striking his friend in the head. "Jack Bauer told me this was going to happen — you guys are trying to kidnap me!" he yelled, as if he were a character in the TV show "24."

When the woman giving them a lift pulled the car over, Burke leaped on her and wrestled her to the ground. "Me and my platoon are looking for terrorists," he told her before grabbing her keys, driving away and crashing into a guardrail.

Burke was charged with auto theft, drunk driving and two counts of assault. But in October, a court-martial judge found the young lieutenant not guilty "by reason of lack of mental responsibility" — the almost unprecedented equivalent, at least in modern-day military courts, of an insanity acquittal. 

Four military psychiatrists concluded that Burke suffered from "polysubstance-induced delirium" brought on by alcohol, lack of sleep and the 40 milligrams of Dexedrine he was issued by the Air Force.

In a small but growing number of cases across the nation, lawyers are blaming the U.S. military's heavy use of psychotropic drugs for their clients' aberrant behavior and related health problems. Such defenses have rarely gained traction in military or civilian courtrooms, but Burke's case provides the first important indication that military psychiatrists and court-martial judges are not blind to what can happen when troops go to work medicated.
read more here

106,000 Soldiers were on prescription medication for three weeks or more last year

They give them meds to sleep, calm down and then to wake up. They go for help with PTSD but are given meds and sent back to duty. What really gets missed is that most meds come with a warning about the need to reduce stress and be monitored by a doctor. They are not given therapy and usually end up with chaplains without a clue what PTSD is. One other problem with this is the fact part of PTSD is short term memory loss. If they pop a pill when they are supposed to then forget they took it, you have an overdoes. If they think they took it but didn't, then there is another problem. With just medication, still in danger and under stress, they are not getting better and lose hope of ever feeling better. Heavily armed, depressed, medicated warriors arrive at the choice of pulling the trigger or trying again tomorrow.

Chiarelli Rejects ‘Medicated’ Army Claim
August 09, 2010
Military.comby Bryant Jordan

The Army is not drugging its troops to cope with combat, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said during an Aug. 8 interview on ABC’s “This Week with Christiane Amanpour.”

Chiarelli, referencing a July Army report showing a sharp increase in Soldier suicides and an increase in serious crimes committed by GIs, said the study’s claim that “data would suggest [the Army is] becoming more dependent on pharmaceuticals to sustain the force” is a concern. The report continues: “In fact, anecdotal information suggests that the force is becoming increasingly dependent on both legal and illegal drugs,” with about one-third of Soldiers on some kind of prescription drug.


Chiarelli acknowledged that more than 106,000 Soldiers were on prescription medication for three weeks or more last year -- including antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. But he said the drugs were authorized by U.S. Central Command’s medical personnel, rejecting Amanpour's comment that the report “raises the specter of a significant number of people out there, heavily armed, afraid, under fire, IEDs [around], and drugged.”

“But we know,” Chiarelli said, “that the drugs we’re talking about are cleared by CentCom surgeons for Soldiers to be taking when they’re down-range. So we’re not sending any Soldier into harm’s way who is taking any drug that we feel would somehow endanger him or some others.”
read more of this here
Chiarelli Rejects Medicated Army Claim

Still Dying Under the Army's Care

Medicine is great to reduce pain when you are hurting but medicine for the rest of your life is not a good thing when you are in pain and no one is stopping the cause of the pain. If you have a bullet wound, you wouldn't want someone to tell you to pop a pill while they plan on leaving the bullet in and let the wound just bleed. So how is killing off pain but not going after the cause of it doing anyone any good? This is what a lot of veterans complain about. Medication is easy to give but therapy is harder to provide, so it is not done nearly as much as they need to. Numb them up with pills and then complain because they are using them more than they should seems idiotic just as complaining about them using street drugs to feel better when medications they are given make them feel worse.

Army downplays story on WTU at Fort Carson

Survey: 90 percent 'satisfied' with level of care
By Jeff Schogol, Stars and StripesStars and Stripes online edition, Monday, April 26, 2010
RELATED STORY: Pentagon Wounded Warrior care official forced out
ARLINGTON, Va. — The Army on Monday played down a New York Times story that found problems with a Warrior Transition Unit at Fort Carson, Colo., saying it wasn’t an accurate reflection of overall care there.
The story, published Saturday, painted a bleak picture of troops receiving little therapy, being prescribed various medications that leave them disoriented or addicted, and enduring harsh treatment from noncommissioned officers.
Some of the soldiers swap medications with their comrades and others try heroin, which is readily available, according to the newspaper.
Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker said the Times’ story focused on a “select number of soldiers and families that were encountering problems,” and does not reflect the majority of soldiers in care.
read more here
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=69619

But as a refresher so that we all remember this has been going on for a long time, here's a story from 2008 and what happened to a medicated solider instead of a treated one.

Dying Under the Army's Care
By MARK THOMPSON Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008


Iraqi insurgents wounded Gerald Cassidy in the deafening blast of a roadside bomb just outside Baghdad on Aug. 28, 2006. But it took more than a year for him to die from neglect by the Army that had sent him off to war. When Cassidy returned to the U.S. last April, the Army shipped him to a hospital in Fort Knox, Ky., to get treatment for the excruciating headaches that had accompanied him home. For five months, he made the rounds of Army medical personnel, who couldn't cure a pain that grew steadily worse. Unable to make room for him in a pain-management clinic, the Army increasingly plied him with drugs to dull the torment.

At summer's end, the headaches had grown so intense that Cassidy pleaded once more for help, and his doctor prescribed methadone, a powerful narcotic. The next day, calls to Cassidy's cell phone from his wife Melissa went unanswered. After two more days without word from her husband, she frantically called the Army and urged that someone check on him. Nine hours later, two soldiers finally unlocked the door to his room. They found Cassidy slumped in his chair, dead, his laptop and cold takeout chicken wings on his desk.

The "manner of death" was summed up at the end of the 12-page autopsy: "Accident." But when he died, Cassidy had the contents of a locked medicine cabinet coursing through his body, powerful narcotics and other drugs like citalopram, hydromorphine, morphine and oxycodone, as well as methadone. The drugs--both the levels that Cassidy took and "their combined, synergistic actions," in the medical examiner's words--killed him.



Read more: Dying Under the Army's Care

Drug Problems Among Iraq, Afghan Vets Could Dwarf Vietnam

If you go here there is an extensive post I did on the practice of medicating our troops.

PTSD On Trail:Sgt. Nicholas Horner and the wound he spread

The Hartford Courant sounded the alarm bell years ago, but no one heard it. I guess the broadcast media was just too busy reporting on events at the time, like movie stars in trouble or other salacious pieces of gossip. What was being done to our troops above and beyond the hazards of combat was deplorable and apparently it still is. Read this and then know full well, that there is one more lesson we never learned from Vietnam. We didn't take care of them when they were deployed and we certainly didn't take care of them willingly either. We made them fight for everything we ended up doing for them. How long do you think it will take the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to be treated right?

Drug Problems Among Iraq, Afghan Vets Could Dwarf Vietnam
Drug Addiction Rates in Afghan/Iraq Vets Could Surpass Vietnam’s Rates

Atlanta, GA 6/15/2009 10:07 PM GMT (TransWorldNews)
Rather than the heroin addictions many Vietnam veterans brought back with them from Southeast Asia, today's returning soldiers are more likely to be addicted to prescription medications -- the very opiates prescribed to them by the military to ease stress or pain -- or stimulants used by soldiers to remain alert in combat situations.

As a result, the U.S. could face a wave of drug addiction and mental-health problems among returning veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars greater than that resulting from the Vietnam War, according to experts at the recent Wounds of War conference sponsored by the National Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA*) at Columbia University (Join Together is a project of CASA).

Historically, substance abuse has "not only been present but fostered by the military," said keynote speaker Jim McDonough, a retired U.S. Army officer and former strategy director at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. "At Agincourt, the Somme and Waterloo, soldiers got liquored up before combat ... There's been almost no break in that [tradition] today."

"I think there's a lot more [soldiers addicted to] pharmacological opiates than the data show," said John A. Renner Jr., M.D., associate professor of psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine and associate chief of psychiatry at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Boston Healthcare System. "A lot of them were using opiates before they went, and a lot are reporting that opiates are freely available in combat areas."

Nora Volkow, M.D., director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), noted that while many soldiers receive prescription opiates for traumatic injuries and pain, the drugs also are effective in relieving stress. "So, even if you don't take it for that, it will work," she said.
go here for more
http://www.transworldnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=94142&cat=10