DAILY MAIL - PRINCE WAS THROWN OUT BY HIS FATHER AT AGE 12
We know that Prince hated his music up on YouTube but we also know that there are a lot of homeless fans of Prince who are totally upset that he may have died because of a pain killer addiction. So for now, we'll enjoy this concert video as long as we can!
SLATE : PRINCES DEATH = WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT ADDICTION REALLY MEANS byJerrold C. Winter
"The reporting on Prince’s death reveals how much we don’t understand about chronic pain management."
EXCERPTS: We could start with a simple question: How does a drug know where to go? We know where we want them to go: aspirin to our aching joint; antibiotics to the site of infection; alcohol, caffeine, and THC to our brains. But the fact is that they don’t know where to go—once in the blood stream, they bathe virtually every cell in the body. A drug produces its effects by attaching itself to a structure of the cell called the receptor; receptors can be very selective, responding only to certain drugs and ignoring all the rest. Opiates reach receptors in the brain and spinal cord to dampen our experience of pain. But there are other opiate receptors. Some are in the gut, which can cause constipation. More ominously, there are opiate receptors in a primitive area of the brain, the medulla oblongata; when opiates suppress the activity of the medulla, breathing is slowed and may stop entirely. Death is the endpoint....
Writing in 1985, the late physician and professor of pharmacology John Morgan said that American physicians undertreat pain, based on an irrational and undocumented fear that appropriate use of opiates will lead patients to become addicts; Morgan called this fear “opiophobia.” In the years that followed, the medical profession came to recognize that many Americans were living and dying in pain, with cancer of greatest concern. The remedy provided was increased prescription of morphine and morphinelike drugs such as oxycodone and hydrocodone, the active principles in Percocet and Vicodin, respectively. There is no doubt that these prescriptions reduced the overall burden of pain. But in 2014 alone, prescription opiates and heroin were implicated in more than 28,000 deaths. In response to what has been called an epidemic, groups such as the Centers for Disease Control issued guidelines in March calling for stringent restrictions on access to opiates. The death of Prince is likely to add force to these calls....
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