Educating the nation: DO addiction specialist appears on CNN

Last week, as the nation mourned the untimely death of the musician Prince by dressing in purple, watching Purple Rain, and remembering the singer-songwriter-guitarist on social media, news emerged that Prince’s death may have been related to opioids.

Several news outlets reported that authorities investigating the death found prescription opioid medication on Prince or in his home. Sources also told media that a health scare the star had on an airplane a week before his death was an opioid overdose that was treated with the overdose-reversal drug naloxone.

On Thursday, William Morrone, DO, the president of the American Osteopathic Academy of Addiction Medicine, appeared on CNN to discuss the dangers of opioids and the importance of careful pain management in patients taking them. He noted that several factors can impact the potency of an opioid.

“If it was an accidental overdose because it was pain management gone terribly wrong, it could have happened because he had a respiratory infection, he had sleep deprivation, and there’s a lot of other things [that] go on that reduce your respiratory capacity,” Dr. Morrone told CNN anchor Carol Costello. “You just can’t breathe the same with a respiratory overdose. So what’s an ordinary amount of pain medicine, now becomes high-risk, and life-threatening.”

Dr. Morrone also discussed how the opioid-reversal drug naloxone works and the fact that additional medications a patient takes while using opioids can render the drug deadly.

“So if Prince took another kind of drug when he was home, or more pain medication, then that could have triggered another overdose, perhaps?” Costello asked Dr. Morrone.

Dr. Morrone responded: “It would be something as simple as a muscle relaxer, a sleeping pill. So now you’ve stacked medications that reduce respiratory drive. And you stack them on top of somebody who may have a pulmonary infection. So this may have been a terrible pain management crisis that went wrong.”

Mismanagement of pain—separate from addiction—is one heartbreaking component of the overdose epidemic sweeping the nation, Dr. Morrone noted.

Read the entire transcript of Dr. Morrone’s interview at CNN or watch video of his appearance on YouTube.