The Rise on Prescription Drug Abuse

Many of Americans have been diagnosed with chronic pain. In fact according to the Institute of Medicine 116 million United States adults live with chronic pain. The majority of these adults do not seem to receive the adequate treatment needed to help them to cope or to treat their pain. This is primarily due to the physicians not being able to efficiently diagnose their patients, and or the physicians lack the knowledge of the best ways to help manage the pain their patients are experiencing. This is why most people believe that Physicians are the main cause for the rise of prescription drug abuse (Garcia, 2013).

Between the years of 1999 and 2010 the amount of prescription painkillers that were sold to the pharmacies, hospitals, and the doctor offices nearly quadrupled. This means that physicians are prescribing four times more pain medications than they did 11 years ago. The amounts of overdoses caused by painkillers tripled in the years of 1999 thru 2008. Painkiller overdoses in the United States play a significant part in the morbidity and mortality rates, and is considered to be a public health problem (Garcia, 2013). Each year for the past eight years doctors have prescribed over 200 million prescriptions for pain killers and compared that to the number of adults in this country at only being 240, 000 (Wood, 2014).

The mass majority of people point fingers only at physicians and dentists and want to blame them and only them for the prescription drug problem. A study that was done in 2010 showed that 12 million Americans ranging from 12 years of age and older reported that they have abused prescription pain killers within the last year (Garcia, 2013). Majority of doctors would not prescribe 12 year old painkillers unless...

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...each other for addicts business. They began to give out prescriptions for opiates like they were giving out candy. Doctors can get their reviews on Yelp and if they did not give out prescriptions for painkillers than they would receive bad reviews and loose their patients business. All of the court cases and doctors being greedy has led our country down the path of addiction.

Works cited

Cepeda, S. M., Fife, D., Chow, W., Mastrogiovanni, G., & Henderson, S. C. (2012). Assessing Opioid Shopping Behavior. A Large Cohort Study from a Medication Dispensing Database in the U.S., 325-334.

Garcia, A. M. (2013). Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. Balancing the Public Health Problems of Chronic Pain and Prescription Painkiller Abuse and Overdose, 42-46.

Wood, G. (2014). What Makes this Drug Crisis Different fom all Other Drug Crisis. Doctors Without Moral Borders, 1-4.