BUT IT’S LEGAL.

Here’s an interest video via CNN on some of the trouble that Americans are having with prescription pills.  The prescribing and dispensing of narcotics legally is a multi billion dollar per year business yet we hear very little about the addictive properties of these drugs.  We hear almost nothing of the lives that get ruined, the families that get torn apart, etc. 

Fortunately for us though here in America, we have the War on Drugs going strong and what a war it is! 

Prescription drugs are the second most commonly abused category of drugs, behind marijuana and AHEAD of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs. The National Institutes of Health estimates that nearly 20 percent of people in the United States have used prescription drugs for non-medical reasons. 

In 2000, about 43 percent of hospital emergency admissions for drug overdoses (nearly 500,000 people) happened because of misused prescription drugs. This type of drug abuse is increasing partially because of the availability of drugs, including online pharmacies that make it easier to get the drugs without a prescription, even for minors.

Hospital stays from an unintentional overdose of opioids (such as Vicodin and Percocet) and sedatives (such as Valium and Ativan) jumped 37 percent between 1999 and 2006, a study by the American Journal of Preventative Medicine found. Intentional overdoses of these drugs skyrocketed by 130 percent in that time.

“The biggest and fastest-growing part of America’s drug problem is prescription drug abuse,” says Robert DuPont, a former White House drug czar and a former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “The statistics are unmistakable.” 

About 120,000 Americans a year go to the emergency room after overdosing on opioid painkillers, says Laxmaiah Manchikanti, chief executive officer and board chairman for the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians. 

So here we have drugs that are abused more often than cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamines yet they can be obtained by simply stating that you have back pain.  That is all.  No tests, no oversight, no background check into doctor shopping, not even a simple check to a neighboring pharmacy to see if this prescription has been picked up already. 

My question is where are the taskforces?  Where are the men in black kicking in doors of doctor’s offices with guns blazing?  Where is the outrage?  If 120,000 people had to go to the emergency room per year after Chiropractic visits, would the public be as calm, cool and collected over the state of Chiropractic?  I highly doubt it.  If 120,000 people overdosed on a Traditional Chinese Herb, would it still be on the market?  Ephedrine and the outcry over a dead baseball player gave us the answer to that question (fortunately the pharmaceutical equivalent, psuedoephedrine, is still readily available). 

The point of this post is again not only to point out the highly addictive properties of pain killers and the fact that there is real damage being done to real people by their prescription.  The point is to ask the question, “Why are we allowing this to happen?”

While pharmaceutical companies make billions of dollars selling these products, where is their investment in treatment centers for the people that become addicted to them?  Where is the responsibility that we so often enforce on companies in areas outside of the health arena?  Should Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of Oxycontin, one of the most addictive pharmaceuticals on the planet be held in some form responsible for the product that it makes?  Or does the company’s responsibility end once the consumer is addicted?

Or do we simply blame the addict?  Does the responsibility lie with the user of the product to make sure that they don’t become addicted?  Do tell.