White people more likely to get ER pain meds

Anyone who's ever worked in an ER can tell you that one of the biggest hassles is junkies coming in looking for pain meds. So what's the best way to con these meds out of the ER staff? According to a recent report making the rounds today, it helps to be white.

Emergency room doctors in the United States are prescribing strong narcotics more often to patients who complain of pain, but minorities are less likely to get them than whites, a new study finds.

Even for the severe pain of kidney stones, minorities were prescribed narcotics such as oxycodone and morphine less frequently than whites.

In the study, opioid narcotics were prescribed in 31 percent of the pain-related visits involving whites, 28 percent for Asians, 24 percent for Hispanics and 23 percent for blacks.

Minorities were slightly more likely than whites to get aspirin, ibuprofen and similar drugs for pain.

In more than 2,000 visits for kidney stones, whites got narcotics 72 percent of the time, Hispanics 68 percent, Asians 67 percent and blacks 56 percent.

The study appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Hear that minorities? There's another lesson to be learned. When you need to score meds from the ER, ask your white buddy to do it for you.