Humans have never lacked for ways to get wasted. The natural world is full of soothing but addictive leaves and fruits and fungi

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问题     Humans have never lacked for ways to get wasted. The natural world is full of soothing but addictive leaves and fruits and fungi, and for centuries, science has added them to the pharmacopoeia to relieve the pain of patients. In the past two decades, that’s been especially true. As the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations developed new policies to treat pain more actively, approaching it not just as an unfortunate side effect of illness but as a fifth vital sign, along with temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate and blood pressure,a bounty of new opoids(鸦片类药物)has rolled off Big Pharma’s production line.
    There was fentanyl,a synthetic opioid around since the 1960s that went into wide use as a treatment for cancer pain in the 1990s. That was followed by Oxycodone,a short-acting drug for more routine pain, and after that came Oxycontin, a 12-hour formulation of the same powerful pill. Finally came hydrocodone. The government considers hydrocodone a Schedule III drug—one with a " moderate or low " risk of dependency, as opposed to Schedule II’s,which carry a "severe"risk. Physicians must submit a written prescription for Schedule II drugs; for Schedule Ill’s, they just phone the pharmacy.(Schedule I substances are drugs like heroin that are never prescribed.)For patients, that wealth of choices spelled danger.
    The result has hardly been surprising. Since 1990, there has been a tenfold increase in prescriptions for opioids in the U. S. , according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDCP). In 1990 there were barely 6,000 deaths from accidental drug poisoning in the U. S. By 2007 that number had nearly quintupled,to 27,658.
    Health officials do not tease out which drug is responsible for every death, and it’s not always possible. "There may be lots of drugs on board," says Cathy Barber, director of the Injury Control Research Center at the Harvard School of Public Health. " Is it the opioid that caused the death? Or is it the combination of opioid, benzodiazepine and a cocktail the person had?" Still,most experts agree that nothing but the exploding availability of opioids could be behind the exploding rate of death.
    Despite such heavy death toll, the suivellance over these popular pills faces regulatory maze. In early 2009,the FDA announced that it was initiating a "risk-evaluation and mitigation strategy". The regulations the FDA is empowered to issue include requiring manufacturers to provide better information to patients and doctors, requiring doctors to meet certain educational criteria before writing opioid prescriptions and limiting the number of docs and pharmacies allowed to prescribe or dispense the drugs. "And with all that,"warns Dr. John Jenkins, director of the FDA’s Office of New Drugs, " we do still have to make sure patients have access to drugs they need. "Any regulations the FDA does impose won’t be announced until 2011 at the earliest and could take a year or more to roll out. That leaves millions of people continuing to fill prescriptions, tens of thousands per year dying and patients in genuine pain wondering when a needed medication will relieve their suffering—and when it could lead to something worse.
The aim of FDA’ s regulation over opoids is to______.

选项 A、ban doctors from prescribing these medicine
B、minimize the undesirable effects of these medicine
C、require manufacturers to provide better information to patients and doctors
D、limit the number of doctors eligible for prescribing these medicine

答案B

解析 本题考查对最后一段内容的理解。最后一段第一句话就指出虽然鸦片类药物造成的社会影响触目惊心,但是对于它的监督仍然好像是走进了一个迷宫。接着具体介绍了监督管理部门——美国食品与药品管理局的计划,他们在2009年提出要进行监管,但是具体成型要到2011年。而且他们的领导人也指出“无论采取什么监管措施,都必须保证有需求的病人仍然能够买到他们需要的镇痛药”。由此可见[A]是错误,监管的目标并不是要禁止鸦片类药物,而是要通过调查和监管将这种药物的医疗副作用和社会不良影响降到最低。[B]准确。[C]、[D]利用原文内容,设置干扰选项,它们只是FDA提出的监管内容,不能和监管目标混为一谈。
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