America’s fatal addiction to prescription drugs
Hillbilly Heroin (Oxycontin) use is really on the rise across the US, and it has some highly dangerous consequences.
Over the last 10 years, prescription drug abuse – abuse of medications which are legal for distribution – has become a national epidemic. Prescription drugs now surpass motor vehicle accidents as the No 1 cause of accidental death in almost half the states in this country. Last year, nearly 30,000 Americans died from an overdose, with at least half of these deaths related to legally controlled substances that were misused, abused, prescribed incorrectly, or simply just in the wrong person’s hands.
Among the startling statistics, the United States now consumes 80% of the world’s opioid pain medications and 99% of the world’s hydrocodone (semi-synthetic opioid). The milligram per person use of prescription opioids in the United States increased from 74mg to 369mg, an increase of 402%, between 1997 and 2007. Prescription medication abuse is now only second to marijuana in terms of frequency. Prescription pharmaceuticals have become the newest – and seemingly, deadliest – gateway drug we have seen yet; nearly a third of people aged 12 and over who used drugs “recreationally” for the first time in 2009 began by using a prescription drug non-medically.