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

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

admin2014-09-05  44
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 soaring number of death from drug poisoning is due to______.
选项 A、combined use of different drugs
B、wrong prescription of doctors
C、uncertain resource
D、easy access to opoids
答案D
解析 本题考查对三、四段内容的理解。第三段提到了由于药物泛滥，因偶然药物中毒死亡的人数也在激增。第四段首先是医疗官员的意见，他们认为没有办法给每一次死亡定性，因为导致药物中毒的因素很多，可能并不是某一种药物的作用，而是好几科-药物混合起了作用。关键在第四段最后一句话，虽然个案的定性有困难，但是专家还是一致认定如此明显的死亡数量增加一定是与鸦片类药物的泛滥有关系的。[A]和[C]都属于断章取义，混淆了医疗个案和群体案件定性之间的区别。[D]选项中easy access是原文exploding availability的同义改写，正确。[B]无中生有。
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