Pharmageddon: Prescription drugs are killing America's youth. (NaturalNews) No parent wants to lose a child, but when one dies from something that should be very preventable, the heartbreak and tragedy is compounded. Such is increasingly the case with prescription drugs - they're killing our youth. Sarah Shay and Savannah Kissick, of Morehead, Ky., best friends since high school, were both victims of what experts and the White House are describing as an epidemic of prescription drug deaths.
Sarah died in 2006 at the tender age of 19; Savannah just three years later, at 22. Since the medications they were using were prescribed by physicians, some experts believe they carry some sort of legitimacy. But the fact is they are being abused by young people just the same as drugs that are illegal - more so even, in some cases. "I don't think the kids have any idea how addicting the substance is," Karen Shays told the BBC in an interview. "Before they know it, bam!
So bad is the addition that some kids have even turned to crime to feed it. Prescription drugs responsible for more deaths than traffic accidents, study finds. (NaturalNews) Every 14 minutes, a person is killed by prescription drugs -- and unlike most other causes of preventable death, which have been on the decline for years, medication-induced deaths are on the upswing across the US. According to a recent analysis conducted by the Los Angeles Times (LA Times), drug-induced deaths have become so prevalent that their average yearly total now exceeds the number of deaths caused by traffic accidents.
It is truly a sad day in the world when the very medications prescribed for treating disease are one of the leading causes of death, including among young children. And based on data retrieved by the LA Times, the number of drug fatalities has doubled within the past ten years, as legal drugs now kill nearly 38,000 Americans every single year -- and these are just the deaths about which we know. Sources for this story include: SPECIAL REPORT: Sarnia awash in painkillers; one woman’s struggle with addiction - The Sarnia Observer - Ontario, CA. Editor's note: This is the first in a three-part weekly series about opiate use in Sarnia-Lambton.
At first, they were just a handful of pills in a small plastic bottle stuffed away in her mother's medicine cabinet. Then, they were the answer to Nancy Roy's migraines. They'd been coming on in waves and she was looking for relief. The kids were crying, her head was thumping, she told her mother about the pain.
"Here," her mother says. "This will help, but it's strong. Nancy was experienced her first opiate rush. Nancy's mind would slow and her problems fade. "I was everything I always wanted to be on those pills," she says. Those pills, five-milligram Percocets, gave her a blast of energy. In those days, life was easy on one pill. She'd go back to the medicine cabinet every once in a while for her "treat. " Three months later, she came down with what she thought was the flu. While out on an increasingly rare "good night" she explained to a friend about the perpetual flu that was dogging her.
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For the first time in nearly a century, automobile accidents are no longer the nation’s leading cause of accidental deaths, according to a major report released Tuesday by the National Center for Health Statistics. “This is just the tip of the iceberg of the prescription drug abuse problem,” says Dr. Nearly nine out of ten of those poisonings were caused by prescription drug overdoses, with the chief culprit being opiate-based pain relievers such as Vicodin (hydrocodone), OxyContin and Percocet (oxycodone), codeine, morphine—and let’s not forget Actiq (fentanyl), the infamous berry-flavored lollipop that is 100 times stronger than morphine and—like most opiate analgesics—so overprescribed that only about 10% of its sales come from its original indication to treat cancer pain.
Daily Exchange. ____________________ Drug Use Many drug control initiatives to date based on insufficient evidence, but emerging evidence-based interventions could reduce drug-related harms New York - The pursuit of public good is an appropriate objective of drug policy, and necessitates the judicious application of controls over availability, prevention, treatments and rehabilitation.
Public good may be achieved by increasing the number of people who are completely abstinent and also through reduced levels of use or changed patterns of use by those who continue to use. Policy makers have pursued many drug control initiatives that lack scientific evidence for their effectiveness, and that can cause harm through unintended consequences.
But evidence-based interventions are emerging that can make drugs less available, reduce violence in drug markets, lessen misuse of legal (pharmaceutical) drugs, prevent initiation in young people, and reduce drug use and its consequences among existing users. HOOKED, PART 3: Sarnia's battle with a prescription painkiller epidemic - The Sarnia Observer - Ontario, CA. Editor's note: This is the third in a three-part series about opiate use in Sarnia-Lambton When Nancy Roy emerged from the fog of addiction everything she knew, and everyone she loved, was gone. Sobbing at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Sarnia, she couldn't believe what her life had come to. She felt shameful, she told the group. How could she face her children after what she'd put them through?
For years her two oldest had run the household while she battled addiction. After the meeting a stranger came up to her. "He told me he wanted to talk to me and then he said, 'The second you start doing something about your problem is the second you can stop being ashamed.'" Those words stuck. Moving On "After the fog has lifted, it just feels surreal," Nancy says, holding a cup of coffee in both hands. Sitting in a Tim Hortons, she says it's been a hard road back from eight years as a prescription pill addict. "You see the damage you caused. "I had no self-esteem, no sense of self worth ... Dr. Are Pill Mill Pharmacies replacing Family Pharmacies throughout the country? Dec-10-2011 02:20 Marianne Skolek Salem-News.com "It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty -- and how few by deceit.
" Noel Coward (MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.) - It is widely known that we are experiencing a prescription drug epidemic in every state in the country. Walgreens has put time-delayed safes in all of their Washington stores to house their supply of OxyContin. CVS has notified some Florida physicians and the state's surgeon general that it will not fill prescriptions for some narcotics including OxyContin (read the letter here.) I commend CVS and Walgreens for their positive steps in keeping employees and patrons of their pharmacies safe -- hopefully this safety net will cover the 49 remaining states who are not benefiting from their life-saving action.
In 2008, I had a telephone conversation with then Chairman of the Board and CEO of Walgreens, Jeffrey Rein. Laffer systematically eliminated the lives of a young girl whose ambition was to become a physician. Abuse of prescribed medicines takes deadly toll. The 230-pound Castle Hayne man, who had a tattoo of Johnny Cash on his shoulder, was dead. Alcohol and seven prescription drugs, including anxiety medication for which he had a prescription, were in his system, according to an autopsy report.
He was one of almost 4,000 people in North Carolina who died between Jan. 1, 2006 and August of this year as a result of taking prescription drugs, a number climbing at a steady rate. Many of the overdose victims were prescribed drugs for legitimate reasons and accidentally overdosed. Some obtained them other ways – from a family member's medicine cabinet, purchased from someone else or stolen. How they reached the victims is only part of a vexing issue that's become a national epidemic as overdose deaths escalate each year across the country, including here in North Carolina.
The StarNews analyzed almost five years of drug overdose death records from the N.C. The findings, not including suicide or homicide overdose deaths, are alarming: Prescriptions up. Patient advocacy group funded by success of painkiller drugs, probe finds. But the pills continue to have an influential champion in the American Pain Foundation, which describes itself as the nation’s largest advocacy group for pain patients. Its message: The risk of addiction is overblown, and the drugs are underused.
What the nonprofit organization doesn’t highlight is the money behind that message. The foundation collected nearly 90 percent of its $5 million in funding last year from the drug and medical-device industry — and closely mirrors its positions, an examination by ProPublica found. Although the foundation maintains it is sticking up for the needs of millions of suffering patients, records and interviews show that it favors those who want to preserve access to the drugs over those who worry about their risks. Some of the foundation’s board members have extensive financial ties to drugmakers, ProPublica found, and the group has lobbied against federal and state proposals to limit opioid use.
Sales skyrocketed But in recent years, pain doctors split. Drug Companies Reduce Payments to Doctors as Scrutiny Mounts. Continued reporting on the influence of pharmaceutical money on medicine spurred tighter rules at medical schools across the nation. This is part of our year-end series, looking at where things stand in each of our major investigations. Some of the nation's top medical schools cracked down on professors who give paid promotional talks for drugmakers last year, and the firms themselves cut back on such spending in the wake of mounting scrutiny. Last year began with the University of Colorado Denver and its affiliated teaching hospitals launching an overhaul of conflict-of-interest policies [1] after ProPublica found that more than a dozen of its faculty members had given paid promotional talks.
"We're going to just have to say we're not going to be involved with these speakers bureaus because they're primarily marketing," Dr. Richard Krugman, vice chancellor for health affairs, said in an interview in January 2011. Treating the tiny victims of Canada’s fastest-growing addiction. Hours after his birth, stiff-limbed and trembling, Carter was whisked away to a bassinet in a neonatal intensive care unit and fed morphine through a dropper. He broke out in sweats, a fine sheen clinging to his neck and scalp, when, weeks later, nurses started to wean him off. His mother, Laura, who asked to be identified by her first name only, knew exactly what he was going through: She’d experienced withdrawal before. “That was the worst part. Knowing what it feels like, and knowing a little baby … it’s the worst feeling in the world, you know? You don’t want your child to go through that.”
Carter is one of a growing number of Canadian babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome, an addiction to drugs their mothers took while pregnant. Last year, at least 1,057 babies were born in Canada with NAS, an 18-per-cent increase over the year before, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Diagnosed, the condition is treatable.
In her 17 years as a social worker at St. Gregory Bunt, M.D.: The Prescription Opiate Arms Race. Plans for the manufacture and sale of hydrocodone pills five to 10 times more potent than is now available and sold under the brand name Vicodin and others is a warning sign of an escalation of what we might call the "prescription opiate arms race" among pharmaceutical companies. They are competing in a race to develop a stronger super-potent narcotic drug. Reports surfaced last month that four pharmaceutical companies are attempting to develop a drug containing pure hydrocodone in high dosages per tablet. More troubling is that one company, Zogenix, is a year away from applying for approval for its product, Zohydro. If the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approves Zohydro, it could hit the market in two years and elevate the prescription opiate arms race to a new, heightened level.
Hydrocodone, currently the second most abused opiate drug, is available for prescription with other components in 5, 7.5 or 10 mg tablets. History has a well-known habit of repeating itself. As Oxycontin abuse spreads, pharmacy robberies rising. BIDDEFORD, Maine | Police Chief Roger P. Beaupre has seen his share of criminal trends in 30 years on the job, but he was taken aback recently when residents of this quiet coastal city were urged to turn in their unused prescription medications. “We dealt with this one little old lady,” Chief Beaupre said, “who turned in two fairly large bottles with 200 tablets of Oxycontin in each one. “What doctor in his right mind would have prescribed that? It’s ridiculous,” he said. Oxycontin has long made headlines as the powerful pain pill abused by addicts who crush and snort it for spiking high. While social programs and law enforcement have battled the problem in recent years, Oxycontin remains at the forefront of an epidemic gripping some states more tightly than others.
Enlarge Photo **FILE** A handful of 80-milligram Oxycontin pills and two syringes are seen ... more > There were 21 robberies at pharmacies in Maine last year, up from two in 2008 and seven in 2009. Ontario inquest probes rising number of fatal oxycodone overdoses. Brockville, Ont. — Looking back, Dr. Alan Redekopp said his family medical practice is better off now that he has been barred from prescribing narcotics and forced to appear before a disciplinary board this fall over his prescription practices.
No longer are the handful of patients he was treating for chronic pain calling his office begging for refills of their powerful and potentially addictive painkillers, claiming their prescriptions had been lost or stolen, only to turn around and sell them on the street. It was by one of those patients that Dr. Redekopp said he was betrayed when two people died from overdosing on pills he had prescribed at his busy practice of 2,500 patients operating from a Real Canadian Superstore in Brockville. “I can’t prevent anyone taking advantage of my trusting nature,” the doctor told a coroner’s inquest into the deaths of Donna Bertrand, 41, and Dustin King, 19, who died within days of each other in Ms.
The public inquest into the deaths of Ms. Dr. Oxycontin may hook teens more easily than adults. NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The powerful painkiller Oxycontin may be even more addictive for adolescents than it is for adults, new research in mice suggests. Fewer U.S. teens are using illegal drugs, but the abuse of prescription drugs, such as Oxycontin (generic oxycodone) and Vicodin (generic hydrocodone) is rising, Dr. Mary Jeanne Kreek and colleagues from The Rockefeller University in New York City report. The brain undergoes dramatic changes in adolescence, they add, and there is evidence that abusing opioids during this key developmental period may cause permanent brain alterations that increase the likelihood that a teen will be more vulnerable to addiction compared with those who first abuse this drugs as adults.
To better understand the brain chemistry and addiction risks involved in adolescent Oxycontin use, the researchers studied self-administration of the drug in 4-week-old, or "adolescent," mice and 10-week-old adults. The selling of OxyContin. Blackwell on Health: OxyContin and the poor. OxyContin: Purdue Pharma's painful medicine. Feds refuse to limit production of deadly Oxycodone. As abuse mounted, DEA boosted painkiller supply - Drugs.