Medications

How the opioid crisis is disrupting hospital care

"… there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon…"

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Video: The 'end of pain': How anesthesia works

October 16 is World Anesthesia Day, celebrating the 170th anniversary of the first successful demonstration of surgical anesthesia. Prior to then, surgery was very unpleasant, to put it mildly—surgeons turned to alcohol, ...

Medications

The path from prescription painkillers to addiction

Abuse of prescription painkillers has become an epidemic in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even more concerning is that those going through withdrawal may turn to heroin as ...

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Narcotic

The term narcotic (pronunciation: /nɑrˈkɑːtɨk/, from Greek narkō, “Ι benumb”) originally referred medically to any psychoactive compound with any sleep-inducing properties. In the United States of America it has since become associated with opioids, commonly morphine and heroin and their derivatives, such as hydrocodone. The term is, today, imprecisely defined and typically has negative connotations. When used in a legal context in the US, a narcotic drug is simply one that is totally prohibited, or one that is used in violation of strict governmental regulation, such as heroin or morphine.

From a pharmacological standpoint it is not a useful term, as is evidenced by the historically varied usage of the word.

Statutory classification of a drug as a narcotic often increases the penalties for violation of drug control statutes. For example, although federal law classifies both cocaine and amphetamines as "Schedule II" drugs, the penalty for possession of cocaine is greater than the penalty for possession of amphetamines because cocaine, unlike amphetamines, is classified as a narcotic.

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