Prescription Drugs: The Silent Health Crisis
Prescription Drugs apparently kill more than illegal drugs, according to a recent Florida study
It’s Friday night after work. You have to stop by your local pharmacy to pick up your prescription because you would rather spend your weekend doing more enjoyable things. When you arrive, there is a line of at least 10 people waiting. You stand there, toe tapping impatiently, checking your watch, thinking about meeting up with your friends or family later and feeling nothing but frustration at these crowds. Before you write the rush off as another busy Friday evening, consider that the busy nature of the pharmacy might not be due to everyone wanting to stand in line and stare at the back of someone else’s head, but an indicator of a dangerous and growing trend here in the United States.
If you’re like many of us, you have heard many horror stories about illegal drugs like heroin or cocaine, and how they lead to addiction, overdoses and sometimes death. Scary as illegal drugs may be, prescription drugs and their abuse are becoming even scarier. People are abusing drugs prescribed to them by their doctor, and many are not living to tell the tale.
Facts and Figures from Florida
While this is a trend all over the United States, Florida in particular is keeping meticulous stats and figures on deaths related to abuse of prescription drugs. According to the Florida Medical Examiners Commission, prescription drugs currently kill 300 times more Americans than their illegal counterparts. Worried? You haven’t heard nothing yet.
Information from the same report states that “of 168,900 autopsies conducted in Florida in 2007 found that three times as many people were killed by legal drugs as by cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines put together.” Just to compare facts and figures, cocaine was responsible for 843 deaths, heroin for 121, methamphetamines for 25 and marijuana for zero, for a total of 989 deaths in the year 2007. Comparatively, 2,328 people were killed by opioid painkillers, including Vicodin and Oxycontin, and 743 were killed by drugs containing benzodiazepine, including the depressants Valium and Xanax.
Ease of Access Leading to Overuse
Why have the trends changed in favor of more deaths from street drugs to those prescribed by doctors? One huge factor is an easy of access for people. Illegal drugs are hard to come by (and no, I’ve never tried): you have to know a dealer or figure out how to track one down, arrange some type of shady meet up place of exchange, and taking these drugs has to be completely secretive because you can be arrested or your car searched at the drop of a hat or an officer’s whim. With prescription drugs, people can simply overdo it on drugs they are being given by physicians and pharmacists. Some smash the pills up for a quicker high, some just take many at one time, and other are faking injuries and traveling to all the doctors and pharmacies in the area just to get their fix. And these drugs are legally being given to support these habits.
It isn’t so much that what’s contained in illegal drugs is less lethal that what is in prescribed medicines; it’s that people can’t easy their hands on them as easily. If you have health insurance, you could pay maybe $50 for a 3-month supply of a drug like Oxycontin compared to paying the same amount for a week’s worth of fixes of heroin. This trend upsets pharmacists. Some feel like legal drug dealers, but there is not a lot they can do to slow down this trend. They can’t refuse to give a patient their prescriptions if they have a valid doctor’s signature, and people are smart about not returning to the scene of the “crime” frequently enough to arouse suspicions.
Ideas About Reversing the Trend
Obviously, I’m not advocating reversing the trend to have more people dying from use of illegal drugs, but rather stopping the overuse of drugs all together. This may not be feasible now or even a few years down the road, but if some type of health care system were implemented that would allow for the sharing of information across health insurance groups and providers, all physicians and pharmacies would have transparency into patient’s prescription information and would get alerts if a drug was being cashed in on at an alarming rate. If this seems like too much of an invasion of privacy, there could be a system of red-flagging, like if a patient were to fill a prescription three times in a given month at three different pharmacies.
Also, many experts attribute the trend to the increasing popularity among doctors of prescribing painkillers, combined with a leap in direct-to-consumer marketing by drug companies. For example, promotional spending on Oxycontin increased threefold between 1996 and 2001, to $30 million per year. I know that everyone out there is fighting to make that ever-important dollar. But if doctors are buying in (pun intended) to these drug companies’ hype and handing out prescriptions left and right, the blame can be traced all the way back to the drug companies and their marketing. It’s my guess that the companies could tone down their hungry approach to doctors and still make a good profit, and perhaps by scaling back on pushing these drugs into doctors’ hands, the drugs then wouldn’t get handed along to patients.
Drug abuse, illegal or legal, is a serious issues requiring immediate attention. If you suspect a friend or loved one is abusing drugs, seek help immediately.
photo credit: kimberlyfaye
Tags: florida, health insurance, illegal drugs, prescription drugs, research
September 20th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
My most recent experience is that more and more people are looking for alternatives to being on a lifetime regimen of prescription drugs. Although there is an appropriate time and circumstance for drug therapy, most people would benefit greatly from lifestyle modification.
Ken Whidden, DC