By Katrina Robinson
More and more people are purchasing their medications online today—and some are doing so without a prescription. That’s right—many online pharmacies that operate in foreign countries don’t even require that you have a prescription to purchase medications, including pain killers that are highly addictive. Could the easy accessibility of addictive medications through online pharmacies be causing a rise in narcotic prescription drug abuse in the United States?
A new study conducted by investigators from the University of Southern California and Massachusetts General Hospital showed that, over a seven-year span of time, the states that had the greatest expansion of high-speed Internet access showed the most significant increase in drug abuse treatment admissions. Specifically, for every 10% increase in high-speed Internet availability, a roughly 1% increase in prescription drug abuse admissions was seen.
Dana Goldman, director of the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at the University of Southern California, stated, “Our findings suggest that Internet growth may partly explain the increase in prescription drug abuse, since it is well known that these drugs are easily available online.”
What’s really interesting is that during that same seven-year period, rehab admissions to 
treat abuse of cocaine, heroin, alcohol, and other drugs that can’t be purchased over the Internet either rose very little or fell.
Anupam Jena of the MGH Department of Medicine elaborated, “The lack of an increase in abuse of drugs not available on the Internet suggests that an overall growth in drug-seeking behavior cannot explain the rise in prescription drug abuse.”
The results seem to speak for themselves: The rise of online pharmacies coincides with a rise in prescription drug abuse. The scary thing is that this study could only report on those that were admitted to rehab facilities due to prescription drug abuse. Unfortunately, all those that are addicted to prescription drugs and haven’t gotten help yet couldn’t be counted, so who knows what the real numbers look like and how large the effect of online pharmacies on prescription drug abuse really is.
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