Follow your doctor's instructions about tapering your dose. Store at room temperature, away from heat, moisture, and light. Keep track of your medicine. Oxycodone is a drug of abuse and you should be aware if anyone is using your medicine improperly or without a prescription. Do not keep leftover opioid medication. Just one dose can cause death in someone using this medicine accidentally or improperly.
Ask your pharmacist where to locate a drug take-back disposal program. If there is no take-back program, flush the unused medicine down the toilet. Since oxycodone is used for pain, you are not likely to miss a dose. Skip any missed dose if it is almost time for your next dose. Do not use two doses at one time.
Seek emergency medical attention or call the Poison Help line at An oxycodone overdose can be fatal, especially in a child or other person using the medicine without a prescription. Overdose can cause severe muscle weakness, pinpoint pupils, very slow breathing, extreme drowsiness, or coma.
Avoid driving or operating machinery until you know how oxycodone will affect you. Dizziness or severe drowsiness can cause falls or other accidents. Avoid medication errors. Always check the brand and strength of oxycodone you get from the pharmacy. Get emergency medical help if you have signs of an allergic reaction: hives; difficult breathing; swelling of your face, lips, tongue, or throat.
Opioid medicine can slow or stop your breathing, and death may occur. A person caring for you should seek emergency medical attention if you have slow breathing with long pauses, blue colored lips, or if you are hard to wake up. Seek medical attention right away if you have symptoms of serotonin syndrome, such as: agitation, confusion, fever, sweating, fast heart rate, chest pain, feeling short of breath, muscle stiffness, trouble walking, or feeling faint.
Serious side effects may be more likely in older adults and those who are malnourished or debilitated. Long-term use of opioid medication may affect fertility ability to have children in men or women. It is not known whether opioid effects on fertility are permanent.
This is not a complete list of side effects and others may occur. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You may have breathing problems or withdrawal symptoms if you start or stop taking certain other medicines. Tell your doctor if you also use an antibiotic, antifungal medication, heart or blood pressure medication, seizure medication, or medicine to treat HIV or hepatitis C.
Opioid medication can interact with many other drugs and cause dangerous side effects or death. Be sure your doctor knows if you also use:. This list is not complete and many other drugs may affect oxycodone. This is also just one study; future research could produce different findings. But for now, the paper suggests that the reformulation of OxyContin may have at least sped up the increase in heroin overdose deaths — perhaps enough to, in the short term, outweigh the lives saved by preventing more OxyContin overdoses.
Humphreys does not doubt that some people really did move on to heroin because of the OxyContin reformulation. He said he personally knows people who did this. But he cautioned that this does not mean the reformulation of OxyContin was a bad idea. Keep writing million scrips a year without any protections whatsoever?
At some point you have to think about the future. To Humphreys, the key point in favor of the reformulation — and other interventions that make opioid painkillers harder to misuse — is that they prevent more people from getting addicted to the drugs. After all, if the problem was that painkillers were so accessible that they made it easy for people to start on a path that ends with misusing and overdosing on heroin, then the inverse is true as well: Making opioid painkillers hard to obtain and misuse will stop people from going down a path of addiction.
On one hand, you have the current stock of opioid users who are addicted; the people in this population need treatment or they will simply find other, potentially deadlier opioids to use if they lose access to painkillers or the ability to misuse painkillers. On the other hand, you have to stop new generations of people from accessing and misusing opioids — or they will get addicted to the drugs and potentially overdose and die.
Consider the example given in the study: A person got addicted to opioids by misusing OxyContin, but when the formula for the pill changed, he lost his ability to misuse the drug, so he began using heroin instead. Part of this example shows the reformulation working as intended: The person was so burdened by the change that he felt the need to shift to heroin. But what if addiction treatment was made very accessible? So when this person hit the roadblock to misusing opioids posed by the reformulation, he could have decided that it was time to get into an addiction treatment program, instead of going to heroin.
Apply that thousands of times over, and the findings of the paper could have been very different. The reality of the US today, though, is that treatment is not accessible enough for this to be realistic. In some states, for instance, waiting periods for treatment can span weeks or even months.
Lieber agreed that this is plausible. But he argued that the findings of the paper still provide a lesson on the limitations — and dangerous side effects — of well-meaning interventions. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.
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Cicero acknowledged the newer version of OxyContin has helped reduce the number of people abusing the drug. And during that same time period, heroin use increased dramatically. Sign up now for a weekly digest of the top drug and alcohol news that impacts your work, life and community.
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