Poisoning, including from pain medications, overtakes traffic accidents.
By Tim Darragh, Of The Morning Call
Huddled at a table at the Allentown drug rehabilitation center Keenan House, Jeremy Pahula waved a hand to indicate the dozens of men and women like him who were working to stay out of the grip of drugs.
The vast majority of them — Pahula estimated 80 percent — had abused pain medications.
"They're so easy to get," he said.
The widespread availability and abuse of pain medications, particularly opioids, is a major reason why poisonings, largely from pain pills, have for the first time become the leading cause of accidental death in Pennsylvania and the United States.
For health researchers and policy analysts who study mortality data, the change is the result of long-developing trends that accelerated early this decade when opioid pain medications became more prevalent. At the same time, decades' worth of improvements in road and vehicular safety sent downward traffic accident death rates, which had been the leading cause of accidental deaths for a generation or more. Early this year, researchers confirmed that the trend lines crossed in 2008 and poisonings — usually by drugs, and among those deaths, usually involving opioids — overtook traffic crashes as America's No. 1 accidental cause of death.
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