Richard C Dart, Hilary L Surratt, Marie-Claire Le Lait, Yami Stivers, Vikhyat S Bebarta, Clark C Freifeld, John S Brownstein, John J Burke, Steven P Kurtz, Nabarun Dasgupta
OBJECTIVE: Prescription opioid analgesics are commonly prescribed for moderate to severe pain. An unintended consequence of prescribing opioid analgesics is the abuse and diversion of these medications. Tapentadol ER is a recently approved centrally acting analgesic with synergistic mechanisms of action: μ-opioid receptor agonism and inhibition of norepinephrine reuptake. We assessed the amount of diversion and related cost of obtaining tapentadol IR (Nucynta®) and tapentadol ER (Nucynta ER®) as well as other Schedule II opioid medications in street transactions in the United States using the Researched Abuse, Diversion and Addiction-Related Surveillance (RADARS®) System...
August 2016: Pain Medicine: the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pain Medicine