Drugged to their eyeballs – how over-use of medication is destroying the American dream

by Charlene Smith (c)

Forget the Mexican drug lords and the Medellin Cartel; more Americans are addicted to prescription drugs, especially painkillers than cocaine, heroin or most other illicit drugs.

In fact, opioid painkillers are so heavily used and abused in the United States that they have all but killed the cocaine trade. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported in 2010, “a marked decrease in the use of some illegal drugs like cocaine.”[1] The quantity of cocaine seized in El Salvador and destined for the United States plummeted for the second consecutive year, from 4,074 kg in 2007 to 394 kg in 2009, according to the International Narcotics Control Board.

The entry drug for recreational abuse is no longer marijuana; it is prescription medications. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported in 2010[2], “nearly one third of people aged 12 and over who used drugs for the first time in 2009 began by using a prescription drug non-medically.” The White House added: “the latest Monitoring the Future study – the Nation’s largest study of drug use among young people – showed that prescription drugs are the second most-abused category of drugs after marijuana.”

In April, the White House issued a paper: “Epidemic: Responding to America’s Prescription Drug Crisis,” that noted: “Prescription drug abuse is the Nation’s fastest-growing drug problem.” It noted that the use of opioid painkillers had increased more than four fold over the 10 years to 2007.

It’s having a major impact on school performance (among the worst rates in the world), innovation (the U.S. now ranks bottom in the world), workplace productivity and the economic health of the nation. It has a major impact on childcare, in some hospitals in Florida 15 percent to 20 percent of all babies born are addicted to prescription drugs according to Florida attorney general Pam Bondi.

And if the child is not born an addict most parents will do their best to change that with constant supplies of headache pills, antihistamines in spring to prevent allergies, and Ritalin once the child goes to school.  And parents don’t always have a say in this, Ritalin can be prescribed for children by teachers (who have no medical experience) and a parent that tries to buck the system could find social services begin investigating them for neglect.

One set of parents whose 14-year-old sign died after seven years on Ritalin complied when so threatened, and since their son’s death (Ritalin increased the size of his heart) they have become activist. http://www.ritalindeath.com/

Even the Drug Enforcement Administration has weighed in with warnings about Ritalin and similar drugs: “Methylphenidate, a Schedule II substance, has a high potential for abuse and produces many of the same effects as cocaine or the amphetamines... the primary legitimate medical use of methylphenidate (Ritalin®, Methylin®, Concerta®) is to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children. The increased use of this substance for the treatment of ADHD has paralleled an increase in its abuse among adolescents and young adults who crush these tablets and snort the powder to get high. Youngsters have little difficulty obtaining methylphenidate from classmates or friends who have been prescribed it. Greater efforts to safeguard this medication at home and school are needed.”[3]

And yet two-thirds more are spent on Ritalin and its companion drugs in the U.S.A. than the entire rest of the world combined - can American children really be that disruptive? So distracted? Go figure.

Prescription drug abuse tends to be most prevalent (about 80 percent) in white Americans, especially men, they tend to be educated, middle-class and to form the backbone of the economic muscle of this country. Which should be ringing warning bells louder than it has in the infighting halls of Congress.

Addicted parents will often put their children onto drugs, like Ritalin, because they can then claim disability for their children and pay for more drugs. It has long-term negative consequences for the children, but that requires an addict to think beyond the next fix and that is unlikely to happen.

And if doctors won’t give them the drugs – a rare event, but there is a growing coterie of very concerned medical professionals – they get them from pill mills – drug clinics – that predominate and happily dispense opioid painkillers for very minor reasons. Or they source them over the Internet where drugs are cheaper and are often dispensed without a prescription.

  While pharmaceutical companies are becoming mega-rich - they average returns of nine percent a year and are the strongest sector in the U.S. economy, the health care system is buckling. It is predicted that within a decade Americans will spend a third of their income on health care. Sales at Johnson & Johnson rose 7,5 percent this year and at Swiss drug maker, Novartis rose 14 percent – most of its drug sales are in the United States. And yet, they have never invested less in new drug research – the situation is so serious with less research coming from Big Pharma, that the U.S. is spending more (money it doesn’t have) on medical research – and then guess who buys the patents and markets them at high costs to an American public that already paid for the drugs in research dollars.

Remember too that this is the only country in the world that does not negotiate drug prices; big Pharma can charge what it likes here. And the U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries in the world that allow prescription drug advertising and marketing to the general public – and so these ads saturate the media especially radio and television. If it was no longer allowed more than one media house would be in danger of collapse, but then again that’s what was said about tobacco ads.

Doctors who do not want to prescribe find themselves under pressure from patients and their peers. Academic research is corrupted as drug companies pay for research that benefits them – the controversial studies on bi-polar in infants from Harvard professors is a famous example.  And yet a growing number of doctors and psychologists are questioning a society that insists on over-medicating.

Popular television shows like House make light of a doctor who abuses Vicodin, a painkiller that is among the most abused prescription drugs in America. Magazines like Vanity Fair dryly note that at New York parties’ attendees discuss and debate the virtues of the medications they take. 

The New York Times runs regular articles of, as an example, psychiatrists who limit patients to 15-minute visits and refuse to discuss the patient’s condition but merely serve as drug dispensers. They have reported on worrying overuse in the military – 10 percent to 12 percent of active duty members are addicted to prescription medication according to the military - and a growing rate of suicides linked to this.

In Ohio, fatal overdoses more than quadrupled in the last decade, and by 2007 had surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of accidental death, according to the Department of Health. 

There are many ways to solve the problem – if the U.S. government spent five percent of what drug companies do on advising consumers of the risks they are taking that could make a dent.

If the Federal Drug Administration and other research bodies disallowed any scientist who receives government funds from working as a consultant to Big Pharma that could make a dent (and from refusing to have on their boards or making decisions about new drugs those who received more than five percent of their income from Big Pharma).

 The U.S. needs to finally cash in its chips in Iraq and Afghanistan and withdraw and start rehabilitating its troops, but too, the DEA needs to spend more time on resolving prescription drug abuse at home.

It will be a long road, but it’s absolutely necessary that it begin as a matter of considerable urgency.

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[1] Results from the 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings, SAMHSA, 2010 contained in Epidemic: Responding to America’s Prescription Drug Abuse Crisis, Office of the President of the United States, April, 2011 (and too, report of the International Narcotics Control Board, United Nations, 2010 – Section 346)

[2] Results from the 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings, SAMHSA, 2010 contained in Epidemic: Responding to America’s Prescription Drug Abuse Crisis, Office of the President of the United States, April, 2011

[3] U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Drug Information: M http://www.justice.gov/dea/concern/m.html