Everybody's talking about it -- the fastest-growing drugs of abuse are prescribed painkillers, synthetic opiates like OxyContin. "Responding to America's Prescription Drug Abuse Epidemic" is the lead story at the Web site of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, for instance.
There's nothing surprising about these drugs' ascendance. Painkillers have always been Americans' number-one drug attraction, in direct descent from morphine to heroin to Demerol to Percodan to... the present.
The best painkillers provide a sense of detachment from stress and emotional incontinence; that's why soldiers in Vietnam loved the heroin there so much, although most overcame their addictions (even including those who sampled narcotics stateside) once they got home.
Now, it's harder to escape the duress that drove soldiers bogged down in Asia to require pain relief.
Kids learn from the earliest ages to accept and welcome pain relief in a bottle. We don't want our kids to hurt. The best way to do that is through pain meds. As Matt Dillon muses playing the addict protagonist in "Drugstore Cowboy," he feels sorry for civilians, who, unlike him, can't tell exactly how they'll be feeling a few moments after ingesting some powerful chemical substance from a drugstore container.
As I have explained in my books "Love and Addiction" and "The Meaning of Addiction," people seek most critically in addiction the certainty of an experience, especially that of powerful relief from pain and anxiety. Anything with that effect has strong addictive potential, and anyone raised to be not so much sensitive to pain as intolerant of it is a good candidate for addiction.
And so, the standard bromides for reversing our current (actually it's been more or less continuous) painkiller epidemic -- tell kids pills in bottles are dangerous (unlike the ones we often give them), keep pills away from kids (while we generate and distribute more such chemicals virtually by the day), be involved in their lives (isn't that what makes us give them pain pills in the first place?), and be good role models (does that mean we have to be able to tolerate pain ourselves?!) -- are useless. They're hypocritical self-contradictions, really.
The addicted society devolves to the easiest source of addictive relief, as it generates more and more addicts.
We have seen the enemy -- and it is us.
Abram Hoffer was the doctor that cured Bill W of his depression with Vitamin B3. He has wrote his last book for us addicts, 'Vitamin Cure for Alcoholism', just before he passed away aged 91 years in 2009. Do tell other addicts and alcoholic about it. And for the Nutritional cures for addictions, do watch the youtube videos of Abram Hoffer, Joan Larson, and Linus Pauling, the only person to have won two independent Nobel Prizes and who discovered the alpha helix structure of protein and was the pioneer of molecular(genetics) medicine.
Datawise, our best source of information is the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. There was an uptick in illicit drug use (use of illicit drugs plus illicit use of prescription meds) in 2009 (the latest year available ), but the latter is not at a high point.
Why now is there so much noise about psych meds -- particularly painkillers? More people are reporting to treatment for these meds, and authorities are now hyper-alarmed at what has been occurring for a number of years - youthful "recreational" use of pharms.
So, as a society we have always been susceptible to painkillers (and related pharms like tranqs), there is a culture-wide increase in pharm use, licit more so than illicit, including very much the young, and -- although illicit use of these substances is not now peaking -- it is drawing wider and more worried attention as we have now decided to focus on pain killer addiction.
There are thus both underlying truths to focus on, and typical drug hysteria in operation.
America is CONSUMED with alcohol phobia and PREOCCUPIED with alcoholism. Tell me -- do you think a lot of countries have Betty Ford Centers, multiple AA chapters in ever town (been to Spain lately?), and new biographies each month revealing that another star is in recovery (latest - Rob Lowe's)?
Quiz question: name ALL the English-speaking and other Western countries that legally restrict drinking to 21-year-olds. Come up with your answer yet? Nonetheless, despite the fact that only the U.S. among its peers has restricted drinking to full adults for decades, in 2006, the Senate voted UNANIMOUSLY in favor of The Sober Truth on Preventing Underage Drinking (STOP). Whereas 23 senators voted against the resolution that authorized the invasion of Iraq, NONE dared oppose this war. The bill was supported by a wide range of government agencies and public interest groups, and MANY Senators, Congresspeople, and others spoke forcefully on its behalf.
I've got an idea -- let's borrow a page from Saudi Arabia, and KILL people we find with alcohol -- that's about the only way we can up the ante on our anti-alcohol jihad!
Please do not address me as "buddy," and please do not measure my expertise in this field by the number of fans I have- or lack- on Huffington Post.
Thank you.
It is obviously the better choice.
Quit minding other peoples' business and maybe there won't be so many problems.
Illegal drug use is a "mature market". People who want to get high are getting high.
What you've got is a whole country full of people whose jobs (if they have them) are
more or a pressure cooker than ever, house underwater, price of everything except
your labor is going up. Face it, middle America needs a break and the only legal
one, you have to get by prescription. So all the goody-goody types, who have no
real idea how to handle their drugs, are coming to the table and guess what?
Welcome to the War on You, armchair soldiers. Who'da thunk that not following
the label would be criminalized, just because everything else has been? Fear not,
somebody will make a nice paycheck by "helping" you get over that "help".
They are very dangerous products since they can get to produce a serious syndrome of abstinence. The dependent drugs mix moderate and high doses of these products with spirits to harness the effect of these last ones.
http://www.findrxonline.com/rss/articles/farmacodependencia-drugs.htm
I take due note that you mention nothing about the truth of the society we live in, but rather use the kind of "buck up" approach. I thought your beard freaked me out for a reason and now I know why. You're the addiction psychology police. It might be time to reboot. I for one, do not feel your communication method to be in tune with the realities on the ground.
Speaking of the addicted society but pointing no fingers firmly at it is a 'cop' out in that it's the easy story, not the real story. Consumer society that offers empty content is feeding nobody anything of real nutrition soul, body-mind. You know it, and I sure as G know it.
Come on, man. The people know they're being lied to every second of every day. And what happens to change that for the better? Vote for the next promising liar. This country is committing suicide and you know why. Please raise the bar if you're going to carry on the discourse. This is not at the individual level anymore, though it's easy for you to say so and get away with it. If you're really serious about this, beyond the authority figure game play, you'll resonate with us. Perhaps.
A very concerned citizen.
Somehow it has become the norm that we should not endure pain. Why not? sometimes pain is a very good teacher.
Enduring hardship, pain, these are some of the ways of building character, another lost value.
We have to go back to basics, less consumption, more human interaction, more human values.
the other characterizes prescription med abuse as a tremendous contemporary problem and addiction, which BuckCarson is now in recovery from (Praise the Lord!).
Is it any wonder I got into the addiction-drug field?
Sometimes I wonder if we haven't made it easy for people to conquer America, there's an army of zombies all over the country who couldn't care less about anything. In a way, Middle America has become the land of the zombies, of course, not all of Middle America, but part of the population is already lost, not sure how they can be recovered.
Five years sober now, many of my anxieties still exist. They largely revolve around the six figures that I owe the IRS for a capital gain that I promptly lost and couldn't pay in full.
I wish there was a simple solution. This is not something that one can enact a law and expect change. In the inner city, the addiction problem is not huge - it's staggering.
I am five years now without my pain medication. I can't think of anything government can do.
The best we can do, I think, is to continue a dialog on addiction and how it plays a part of our lives. Your book apparently focuses on this and I intend to buy a copy.
Thanks for your initiative.