How many people do you know who are addicted to drugs? I suspect that you know more than you think. Many drug addicts in America today don’t fit the typical junkie stereotype. They aren’t out combing the streets for shady pill pushers; they are waiting in increasingly long lines at their local pharmacies for their doctor-recommended, state-sanctioned and society-approved little orange narcotic containers.
While Americans account for only 5 percent of the global population, we consume 75 percent of the world’s prescription drugs. Are we innately more sickly, anxiety-ridden, ADHD-afflicted and pain prone than any other nation on the face of the planet? If so, we need to seriously reevaluate and probably overhaul our entire culture. However, I think a more likely explanation for our seemingly excessive consumption of pharmaceuticals can be found in the coupling of our casual, collective mentality towards prescription drugs, and our irrational deference to medical authorities.
There appears to be a divide in our minds between street drugs, which are dangerous and taboo, and “pills” that can’t be that bad because doctors prescribe them. The majority of people who buy into this delusion are able to do so because we aren’t consummately aware of how dangerous our commonly prescribed “medications” really are. We’re familiar with the perils of overdosing, but we don’t have enough information on the slow violence caused by long-term, doctor-condoned use. If the prolific rates of prescription drug dependence and abuse in this country are to be abated, we will need to expand our understanding of the consequences of regular drug use over a much longer time span. Without this crucial knowledge, doctors and patients alike are unable to accurately or honestly weigh the costs and benefits of prescribing or taking medication.
The majority of long term studies that we do have on the effects of prescription medication have been conducted by universities and institutions which are directly funded by big pharmaceutical companies. In fact, a shocking number of the scientific studies on this subject published by the nation’s leading medical schools were drafted by ghost writers working for the very drug companies whose products are being investigated. This makes me suspect that some of these so called studies are more akin to embellished advertisements than genuine scientific inquiries. My suspicions are heightened by anecdotal evidence of friends and family members whose mental and physical health has deteriorated dramatically as a result of supposedly safe, doctor-condoned prescription drug use.
I’ll pick on the zealously prescribed but inadequately understood ADHD meds for a moment. One of my good friends, whom I’ve known since elementary school, was prescribed 5mg Ritalin just over two years ago. This friend was always a little rambunctious, but not significantly more so than most of my buddies. When he got on the meds, I began noticing some changes. At first it was minor stuff, like he would call me to hang out at really odd hours. But my friend quickly acclimated to the relatively weak Ritalin pills, and the doctor began prescribing him the more potent Adderall tablets. Today, my friend typically takes two or three 30mg Adderall pills per day. Despite claims made by widely-cited animal studies that have attempted to assuage public fears as to the long term effects of ADHD medication, my friend is a startlingly different person today than he was before he started using the drugs. He’s lost an unhealthy amount of weight. A gloomy shadow hangs over his formerly friendly, fun-loving countenance. I can’t even stand to be around him anymore because he’s irrationally irritable, speaks in an unfamiliar, robotic monotone and always seems to take unnecessarily indirect routes to get to whatever point he’s trying to make. Additionally, he’s prone to wild, unpredictable mood swings, transforming him from an incessant chatterbox at one moment, to a mopey buzz-kill the next. I cannot help but notice similarities between his physical transformation and those that you see in the mugshot pictures of meth addicts over time. Indeed, street-level meth and ADHD medication are chemically quite similar.
Another class of commonly prescribed medication that is strikingly similar to a deadly, illegal narcotic is pain killers. The most widely used pain pills are opioids, derived from opium poppy plants, from which heroin is also derived. My grandmother recently began battling a decade long addiction to painkillers. Since I was a young boy, I remember her as being warm, vibrant and engaging. She took great pride in her appearance, her home, her flowers and her family. As I got older, however, her appearance grew more ruffled, her home more cluttered. My parents eventually intervened, and spoke with her doctors about the pills she was being prescribed. The doc confirmed that she wasn’t “abusing” her meds, that she was taking the allotted doses at the specified times. To our great surprise and alarm, however, he also revealed that she was on about two dozen different types of pills, and the strength of her painkillers had been increasing steadily about every six months as her tolerance grew. She was on anti-depressants, anxiety meds, sleeping pills and everything in between. The supposed need for this cocktail of narcotics stemmed from side effects brought on by her pain pill prescription.
My grandmother is a strong and courageous lady, and she is now battling her addiction, and slowly regaining her life. Yet, as sad as it makes me to admit, she will never be the woman that she once was.
In summation, prescription pills are overprescribed and inadequately studied. The pharmaceutical industry seems to be intentionally producing and promoting misinformation about the effects of their products without regard to the mental, physical and emotional health of their patients. Like too many sectors of industry today, Big Pharm is prioritizing profits over people. This troubling trend of increased regular drug use among Americans needs to stop, and the way to stop it is with the truth about what these drugs actually are and what they actually do. In order to pinpoint the truth about prescription pill use, we will need unbiased, long-term studies conducted on their effects. Additionally, we need these studies to be widely publicized, in order to inform doctors and patients alike on the actual impact modern “miracle pills” have on people’s overall well being. I am hopeful that, as more of these kinds of studies are conducted, we will be able to overcome our collective and individual addictions to silver bullet solutions to common, though often complex, medical conditions.