A new government report shows that the abuse of legal drugs such as pain killers and sedatives sends as many people to the emergency room as illegal drugs such as cocaine and heroine. This data comes from ER records from the year 2008. Only five years earlier, ER visits because of illegal drugs still outnumbered visits resulting from legal drugs by two to one.
This signals an astounding and disturbing rise in the abuse of prescription drugs. Two of the pain killers which were the most commonly overdosed on were oxycodone and hydrocodone.
The report notes that while many of the cases reported by emergency rooms across the country were the result of overdoses, others were actually the result of mixing painkillers with other drugs, or mixing pills with alcohol.
The full causes of this dramatic rise in prescription drug abuse are still a mystery. Many of the patients using these drugs may have gotten them illegally. However, statistics also show that the amount of drugs prescribed over the last few years has been steadily climbing, indicating that at least some of the reported ER visits were the result of drugs obtained legally from a doctor’s prescription.
The report did not note how many of the patients admitted to the ER died from their drug-related illness. However other reports have found that drug-related deaths since the early nineties have been consistently on the rise, with much of the increase attributed to abuse of prescription painkillers.
The report surmises that the danger of prescription drugs is not that they are more deadly than illegal drugs, but that they are perceived differently by consumers. Patients feel more safe abusing a drug that was prescribed by a doctor than one available on the street, even if they are warned that overuse of the drug could be fatal.
The study was conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Upon viewing the report, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy stated, “The abuse of prescription drugs is our nation’s fastest-growing drug problem, and this new study shows it is a problem that affects men and women, people under 21 and those over 21.”
The report concludes that awareness must be raised about the hidden dangers of prescription drugs in order to educate people about their dangers, as well as about the proper ways to store and dispose of them.
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