Prescription for Trouble

We are a pill-popping culture. We take pills to sleep, wake up, get happy and keep our children less hyper. And while people might not realize it, sharing prescription drugs, using false names to get prescription drugs or shopping around to get more than one doctor to prescribe extra prescription drugs are all against the law.

It used to be that law enforcement worried only about illegal drugs like marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. Now, they're dealing with the criminal aftermath of a record number of citizens getting high on drugs their doctors help them get. Deadly car accidents, domestic abuse, sex offenses committed by people too impaired to control themselves. Addicts of prescription drugs have been known to commit crimes to pay for their pills once the insurance runs out.

Health care providers and law enforcement will tell you prescription drug abuse results in the same problems as street drugs: addiction, crime and broken families.

So how bad is the problem? Hold on to your hats for some brand new, jaw-dropping statistics from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Seven million Americans are regularly abusing prescription drugs — not just taking them, abusing them. The drugs of choice are powerful painkillers like Oxycodone, Hydrocodone, Percocet and Vicodin.

The DEA has been studying this for years, so comparisons are easy. In the year 2000, 3.8 million Americans abused painkillers. The latest figure of 7 million marks an 80 percent increase!

Prescription medications now cause more overdose deaths than cocaine and heroin combined!

If that stuns you — and I hope it does — get this. It's not just painkillers Americans depend on to get through the day. There has also been a massive jump in antidepressant prescriptions. It seems inconceivable, but 27 million people are currently taking antidepressants, like Paxil and Prozac, according to a new report in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

There seems to be the feeling that if a doctor prescribes it, it's OK to take, that prescription meds are somehow safer than street drugs. It isn't true. Many prescription drugs have a high potential for abuse, and patients can get hooked before they realize what's happening. Some people get so used to taking a drug their bodies begin to crave more and more of it, and they die of a self-induced overdose.

Look, lots of patients have pain and depression and truly need these drugs, there is no denying that.

But there's real criminality involved here. There are doctors who act illegally when they continue to prescribe or over-prescribe to someone they believe is an addict. There are pharmacies dispensing way too many pills to one household and ignoring the red flag of possible addiction. And there are scads of rogue "pharmacy" Internet sites illegally selling controlled substances. If they run out of doctors to write scripts, the addict often turns to these cyber drug dealers. The sites rake in profits by the millions — per month.

Lawmakers have been talking about the potential for a prescription drug abuse epidemic in America for more than a decade. Now, with a total of 34 million patients currently taking painkillers or antidepressants, I think we've hit the epidemic level. As fast as authorities shut down careless pharmacies and illegal Internet sites, or strip offending doctors of their prescriptions privileges, more criminal enterprises step in to take their place. In the last three years, tens of millions of dosage units of prescription drugs and tens of millions of dollars in assets have been seized, yet it's done nothing to stem the growth of the problem.

The most depressing part of this mess is that it's destined to get worse. Our children are learning awful lessons from our pill-popping behavior. And, it's easy for them to simply slip a few of their parents' prescription drugs out of the medicine cabinet. Don't think your kids wouldn't think about it. The DEA reports nearly one in 10 high school seniors now admit to abusing drugs that weren't prescribed to them.

I've got no brilliant idea for solving this problem. It just seems that we spend so much time, effort and money fighting illegal drugs while overlooking the scourge of prescription drugs. If we're going to crusade against one, shouldn't we include the other?

Our kids aren't stupid. They see the campaign against hard street drugs, and then they watch us down all sorts of prescription drugs like nothing bad can happen.

Bad happens. And we should all spread the word.

Visit Diane Dimond's official website at www.dianedimond.com for investigative reporting, polls and more. To find out more about Diane Dimond and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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