Prescription Drug Abuse

Recently, I was reading an interesting article on Prescription drug abuse. The article said that the abuse of prescription drugs will soon surpass the use of narcotic drugs worldwide. This made me wonder “What is prescription drug abuse and how does it happen?” I did some digging and found that prescription abuse is the use of a drug for something other than what it was intended. Basically, drugs are used for getting a “high”, etc. Prescription drugs that are most commonly abused are psychotropic drugs. These drugs are usually opiate-based to act as pain-relievers, stimulants, etc. Some of the common drugs which are used are “Valium®”, “OxyContin®”, etc.
These drugs can be obtained in a number of ways, some of which are:

· Through tampered, forged or copied prescription forms
· Through the purchase of drugs online
· By obtaining the same prescription from numerous physicians (double-counting or double-doctoring)
· By stealing prescription drugs from pharmacies, physician offices, etc

I also learned that the life-time use of non-medical prescription pain relievers, amongst young adults (aged 18 to 25) increased to 24.3% in 2004 from 23.7% in 2003 in U.S. This is a 0.6% increase in a period of 1 year. Imagine the impact of a similar increase on the future generations 20 years from now. It would be huge and would impact almost everyone either directly or indirectly. Some of the effects would include:

Industry – Rising health costs would drive up insurance premiums and in turn create a demand for high salaries

Economy – Increasing costs brings along with it the ill-effects of inflation, etc. Total economic costs of prescription drug abuse in 2002 were $180.9 billion

Physicians – Loss of credibility, risks of losing patients, potentially increasing practice insurance