Prescription drugs kill three times as many people as street drugs
Here’s a statistic you won’t hear trumpeted at the next Big Pharma convention: It turns out that prescription drugs kill a whopping 300 percent more Americans than illegal drugs do.
This stunning new fact was revealed in a recent report by the Florida Medical Examiner’s Commission after an analysis of over 168,000 autopsies conducted in 2007. It’s a difficult statistic to wrap your head around, but think of it this way: the drugs your doctor tells you take for better health kill THREE TIMES as many people as illegal street narcotics like heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamines combined.
Kinda makes you wonder if we’re fighting the so-called “War on Drugs” against the right enemy.
The study showed that a total of 110 bodies in Florida were found with heroin in them – a 14 percent increase. But more than 1,200 of last year’s deaths were connected to the use of the painkiller Oxycodone – an incredible 36 percent increase in just one year.
Once upon a time, the abuse of prescription drugs was seen as a kind of low-level, white collar form of drug abuse. “Mother’s little helper” as the Rolling Stones once put it. But this newest study proves how devastating and widespread the abuse of prescription drugs has become.
The irony is that some experts say that prescription drugs have become a popular alternative to illegal drugs because prescription drugs are, by comparison, far more easy to acquire.
In fact, while the use of illegal narcotics has actually dropped among U.S. teens, prescription drug abuse has spiked. You know as well as I do that the pervasiveness of prescription drugs in American society plays a major role in this frightening trend.
Sgt. Tracy Busby, the supervisor of a California narcotics unit, agrees that easy access is a big part of the problem. “You go to every medicine cabinet and I bet you’re going to find some kind of prescription medicine in 95 percent of them,” he said.
Recent studies show that more than half of all Americans (this includes all age groups, remember) regularly take at least one prescription drug. And tens of millions are taking two or more. People who take multiple drugs at once run the risk that these medications will interact with each other in a dangerous or deadly way – and they’re not even abusing the drugs!
There is a misconception among many that because prescription drugs are “legal,” they’re safer than illegal drugs. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. And if you ask me, many of these drugs are dangerous even when they’re used under the supervision of a doctor.
I’m not shocked by these sad statistics. The deadly up-tick in prescription drug deaths in Florida is probably being replicated in every other state in the union. It’s an inevitable side effect of all of the pharmaceutical trends I’ve been telling you about for years: the over prescription of painkillers by doctors, and the rise and pervasiveness of direct-to- consumer drug advertising that makes all of these drugs not only seem acceptable, but as safe to use as a couple of aspirin.
This is one case where I hate to say, “I told you so.”
More evidence of disappearing docs
Medical care could become increasingly tough to find here in the U.S. And it has nothing to do with socialized medicine or the healthcare “fixes” being proposed by President- Elect Barack Obama. The simple fact is that in the very near future, we may not have enough doctors to go around.
Seventy-six percent of doctors in a new survey say they are working at “full capacity.” Most of these doctors find themselves so overworked, that they plan to cut their patient load in half. Which, of course, will only make things worse.
This isn’t the first time I’ve warned you about this pending medical crisis. While many doctors are choosing to create niches for themselves in all manner of medical specialties, hardly any are choosing general practice or internal medicine. There are fewer and fewer of primary care doctors in practice, and the medical school rolls show that there won’t be very many more on the way any time soon.
Of the doctors surveyed, 11 percent plan to retire, while 13 percent will seek other positions in the medical field that won’t involve direct patient care. You don’t have to be a math major to realize that these numbers will soon add up to a very big problem.
Obama’s socialized medicine may be problematic; with fewer doctors to go around it could become an unqualified disaster.
