A wave of prescription drug abuse is already here, the damage to our culture is increasingly becoming hard to ignore
The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has just declared a new epidemic. Prescription drug abuse has become the leading cause of unintentional deaths in the country. There were 27,000 deaths from unintentional overdose in 2007, five times the number in 1999. Prescription drugs are now involved in more overdose deaths than heroin and cocaine combined.
The evidence of the suffering caused by this epidemic is most apparent in drug treatment centers. Centers like Narconon Of Georgia are seeing intakes skyrocket as a result of prescriptions drugs. Mary Rieser, director of Narconon says, ” Prescription drugs are dwarfing other drugs in the damage they are capable of doing, lives are being ruined and so far it’s only getting worse.”
If a person addicted to prescription drugs does not get effective treatment, the chances are great that they will either adopt a lifelong addiction like methadone or overdose. There is very little chance that they will get clean on their own. Many prescription drugs cause withdrawal systems when discontinued. These systems can range from simple upset stomach to severe pain and even death. This pain often creates an almost impossible barrier for an addict who wishes to stop.
Marketing Prescription Drugs
In a press conference last year, Joseph A. Califano Jr., the National Center on Drug Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University’s director and president said: “Aggressive marketing of controlled drugs to physicians . . . is designed to increase profits with little regard for abuse potential, Our nation is in the throes of an epidemic of controlled prescription drug abuse and addiction.”
Mr. Califano and others believe that not only is the prescription drug abuse epidemic growing worse, but that it’s cause is linked to the doctor’s and pharmacist’s responsible for prescribing and dispensing the drug in the first place. In the same press conference Mr. Califano called for more stiffer training requirements for both doctor’s and pharmacists. Even with more traning the unbelievable pressure place on physicians by the marketing campaigns run by the pharmaceutical companies is going to make any change very difficult to make.
Instead of Doctor’s prescribing what they believe their patients need, patients are coming in with the idea that they need the prescription they saw on television. Even if a doctor is not willing to prescribe a certain drug there is almost certainly another doctor who will. Many doctor’s feel that they will actually lose patients if they do not write prescriptions for drugs featured on television.
In order to thwart the spread of this epidemic we need to stop selling the cause on television and begin to realize that drugs to not cure everything.
