Junkies

Junkies

   It's a terrible name, isn't it?  Not that "addict" is any better, for both seem belittling, and coming at what likely is a difficult time for people so caught up.  But certain opioids and narcotics are no better than street drugs when it comes to addiction.  And lest you think that the problem is not that prevalent, especially since you likely don't live near broken homes or darkened alleys, a report in 2011 by MedCo Health Solutions (they are the title company of Express Scripts) showed that 1 in 4 women are addicted.  That's 25% of women...but they're not hooked to any drugs on the street, but rather something quite legal and now quite out of hand...prescription drugs.  From the report: Overall, the number of Americans on medications used to treat psychological and behavioral disorders has substantially increased since 2001; more than one in five adults was on at least one of these medications in 2010, up 22 percent from ten years earlier.  Women are far more likely to take a drug to treat a mental health condition than men, with more than a quarter of the adult female population on these drugs in 2010 as compared to 15 percent of men.  Women ages 45 and older showed the highest use of these drugs overall.  Yet surprisingly, it was younger men (ages 20 to 44) who experienced the greatest increase in their numbers, rising 43 percent from 2001 to 2010.  The trends among children are opposite those of adults: boys are the higher utilizers of these medications overall but girls’ use has been increasing at a faster rate.

   So what's going on here?  You've heard the names (and these don't even count the new ones constantly pestering you on television or in magazines): Percoset, OxyContin, Vicodin, Percodan, Adderol (which the Urban Dictionary describes as "Originally a generic version of Crystal Meth")...all have joined an elite group of feel good legally-prescribed drugs (Xanax --the generic name is "alprazolam"-- was recently the most prescribed "psycho-pharmaceutical" drug in the U.S. with close to 50 million prescriptions handed out; the drug leader,Vicodin, had nearly triple that number at 131 million prescriptions in 2011, according to The Daily Mail in the U.K.).  It's a number that leads to more deaths (from prescription drugs) than car accidents in the U.S.

   A quick study guide to benzodiazepines, those anxiety-reducing pills such as Xanax and Valium, can be viewed in the narrative tale by author Lisa Miller writing in New York Magazine (the graph sketches appear at the end of her piece so you'll have to back to the beginning page for the actual article); and the over-prescribing of pharmaceutical drugs has caught the eye of the U.S. government, which has now moved many pain-killing drugs to a higher set of regulations (they are now listed as Schedule II).  According to a CBS report:  Janina Kean, president and CEO of High Watch Recovery Center in Kent, Conn., said she thinks the DEA's new regulations "will have more of an impact on the adult population or individuals inappropriately prescribed very strong narcotics for mild operative procedures, than it will for the nation's adolescents, a population where 96 percent of substance abuse starts."  The new regulations, Kean added, should reduce the availability of "prescription drugs developed for excruciating pain from being used to treat much less severe ailments like dental procedures or minor surgery."  But she foresees potential problems with the stricter regulations.  "With access to drugs like Vicodin and Percocet limited by the regulations and harder to obtain, we may end up seeing a trend of [teens] skipping the pills and going straight to heroin," she said.  Another CBS report highlights the concern she expresses since even a few years ago, the death rate for women from prescription painkilling drug overdose was 18 women per day.

   So what's behind all of this?  Is the U.S. a nation of over-stressed, overworked, underpaid, unemployed people as one set of graphs from 2011 in Mother Jones reports?  Or is it one that, as a report in Democracy Now! suggests from a piece in The New York Times, "questions whether these staggering figures reflect a medical reality, or an over-medicated craze that has earned billions in profits for the pharmaceutical companies involved."  The marketing has paid off, especially with the targeting of drugs to children (A.D.H.D. or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) where profits have increased 500% in just ten years.  But the article also came with this caveat: Even Roger Griggs, the pharmaceutical executive who introduced Adderall in 1994, said he strongly opposes marketing stimulants to the general public because of their dangers. He calls them “nuclear bombs,” warranted only under extreme circumstances and when carefully overseen by a physician.  

   Overall, recent figures show the pharmaceutical industry spending nearly $330 billion to promote drug usage, often double what they spend on research and development (this was shown in a graph from the Washington Post).  Said Ralph Nader, More drug industry funds go to influencing politicians to prevent the implementation of price restraints on its staggering markups...Katharine Greider points out in her book The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips off American Consumers that, "Other countries move to control prices and sharply limit advertising."  This does not happen in the U.S. where many patients confront a "pay or die" system.

    As you can see with anything this pervasive, this is a convoluted and complicated subject; but you may be surprised at where it starts to lead, from getting the drugs out of water systems (yes, they're there and presenting quite a problem) to how few regulations exist regarding the testing for the safety of such drugs (and the surprising number of "approved" drugs that have been recalled due to major complications such as those leading to fatalities).  One question to be asked is why such a large portion of the FDA's drug review budget is still funded by the drug industry itself.  And where's the U.S. government in all this?  It's all coming...in the next posting (sorry).