Opioid Epidemic Gets Treatment Prescription
治愈鸦片流行的处方

Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, addressed ways to deal with the U.S. opioid epidemic at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
国家药物滥用研究所的副所长，威尔逊·康普顿(Wilson Compton)，在美国科学技术发展协会的年度会议上提出了解决美国鸦片类药物泛滥的方法。

撰文/播音 史蒂夫·米尔斯基(Steve Mirsky)
翻译 Meatle
审校 乔虹

“We’ve been dealing with an epidemic in the United States related to opioids.”
“我们已将开始着手解决美国国内的鸦片类药物泛滥现象。”

Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health. He spoke February 12th at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.
这是国家药物滥用研究所的副所长，威尔逊·康普顿(Wilson Compton)，在2月12日于华盛顿，D.C的美国科学发展协会的年度会议上所作的演说。

“What we’ve seen is that the increased number of prescriptions are driving the nonmedical use of prescription drugs.”
“我们所面临的是，开具的处方数量的上升催生了更多的处方药的滥用。”

Drugs that are prescribed to treat pain.
这些处方药物被用于止痛。

“So there’s tremendous availability of prescriptions. There are some 260 million prescriptions written in each year for opioids. That’s not tablets, that’s prescriptions. So it’s millions and millions of these and some of them are available for diversion and use inappropriately.”
“处方的使用有着巨大的空间。每年，有将近2.6亿张与鸦片类药物相关的处方被开出。这仅仅是处方数，而不是药物的总数。因此每年数亿枚药片被开出，其中的一部分被用于消遣娱乐而且使用方法不当。”

Some of the pain patients may become hooked. Or their meds may find their way to friends or relatives who take them recreationally. Or a prescription opioid user may transition to heroin.
部分疼痛病患可能会对这些药物上瘾。或是他们的药物可能被他们的亲友用于消遣。又或是一个处方鸦片的使用者转为使用海洛因。

“Heroin is just another opioid drug, so the brain doesn’t distinguish whether it comes from a pharmacy or from a street drug dealer....
“海洛因是另一种鸦片类药物，因此大脑无法分辨出这些药物是否来自药剂师或是街头贩毒者。”

“What’s been drawing the most public health attention is the overdose death rates related to prescription opioids and heroin, which have increased markedly over the last 15 years. Right now we see drug overdoses killing nearly 50,000 persons in a given year in the United States….”
“公共健康领域最为关注的是过量使用处方鸦片或是海洛因致死的案件，这些案件的数量在最近的15年内显著上升。现在，我们面临着一年内，在美国境内，过量用药杀死接近5万人的状况。”

“What are we doing about this? We’ve focusing in three areas. We need to think about prevention in terms of reducing access to prescriptions as the ultimate upstream driver of this epidemic. We need to be thinking in terms of saving lives acutely by providing greater access to the reversing drug—this is naloxone--that blocks the impact. So if somebody’s overdosed and they’re not breathing and I can get this medication to them quickly, I can resuscitate them. That gives us a chance to help them turn their lives around with the third aspect, which is greater access to effective treatment, through medication-assisted treatment….
“我们对此都做了什么？我们主要关注下面的三个方面：我们需要想出一些预防手段，比如降低处方的可用权作为阻绝鸦片流行的最终手段。我们需要考虑提升解毒剂的可用权，比如纳洛酮，以减少过度用药的影响。因此，如果某人过度用药以致进入了无法呼吸的状况，我可以迅速地获取这类药物并使他复苏。第三个方面是提高有效疗法的可用权，比如药物辅助疗法，这种手段可以使我们有机会拯救他们的生命…”

“But we also think we need to come up with better approaches for treating pain. What are non-medical approaches that might use brain stimulation techniques, for example, to treat pain? What are other medications that don’t include the opioid system that might be useful? … These are the kinds of advances that science can bring us so that we can turn around this overdose epidemic that right now shows tremendous increases each year.”
“然而，我们也想到我们需要找到更好地方式去缓解疼痛。例如，有什么使用大脑刺激技术而非非药物手段以缓解疼痛？有哪些不使用鸦片类药物的药物治疗手段会起作用？…这些是科学研究可以为我们带来的好处，一次我们能扭转现在逐年恶化的过量用药流行的趋势。”