I will not start with the obvious reason our children do not trust our guidance and wisdom when it comes to the use of drugs -the pervasiveness of alcohol through the very core of our society. Alcohol is a legal killer, hard to defend but socially and legally accepted. I'll save the discussion on alcohol for a later time.
How can we tell our children to not use drugs when we are a nation of drug makers, pushers, and users. As I look around the country I see a nation fixated by and with drugs. In a report published by the government called America's Drug Abuse Profile it states that more than a third of all Americans have used or tried an illicit drug. It goes on to say the use of illicit drugs among eighth graders is up 150 percent over the past five years. The University of Michigan’s 1996 Monitoring the Future study found that more than half of all high school students use illicit drugs by the time they graduate. Drug-related illness, death, and crime cost the nation approximately $66.9 billion. Eighty-two percent of all people who try cigarettes do so by age eighteen. Approximately 4.5 million American children under eighteen now smoke, and every day another three thousand adolescents become regular smokers. But this is only part of the story. The real drug pushers are the supply chain and distribution networks designed to get a large, steady, and profitable supply of drugs into the market as quickly and efficiently as possible. I am not talking about the narco-terrorist or the drug king pins from Columbia and Mexico I am talking about the legitimate purveyors of drug - drug manufacturers and its supply chain. When you consider the land sales, construction cost of pharmacies, the nation-wide trucking network, and the proliferation of doctor offices churning out prescriptions to the tune of 1 billion per year the value of this drug network is in the trillons of dollars.
106,000 deaths are from prescription drugs, according to Death by Medicine. That also is a conservative number. Some experts estimate it should be more like 200,000 because of under reported cases of adverse drug reactions.
According to The US Dept of Health and Human Services March 7, 2003 Prevention alert: Students in big cities are "pharming" these days- "pharming" being new lexicon for grabbing "a handful" of prescription drugs and ingesting some or all of them. Young people steal grandma's pills and distribute them at school. Senior citizens falsify their prescriptions for more pain medication. Babysitters take pills from cabinets. An Ohio real estate agent loses her license for pilfering pills from bathrooms at "Open Houses."
The appeal is obvious-the drugs can be legally obtained, the stigma of going to a street pusher can be avoided, and the price isn't steep. There are an estimated 800,000 web sites which sell prescription drugs on the Internet and will ship them to households no questions asked. Today, about one-third of all U.S. drug abuse is prescription drug abuse.
While most illicit drug abuse, particularly for middle and high school teens, began to slow or actually decline in 2002 after a half a decade increase, abuse of prescription drugs continues to climb:
Over the past decade-and-a-half, the number of teen and young adult (ages 12 to 25) new abusers of prescription painkillers such as oxycodone (OxyContin) or hydrocodone (Vicodin) has grown five-fold (from 400,000 in the mid-eighties to 2 million in 2000).
New misusers of tranquilizers such as diazepam (Valium) or alprazolam (Xanax, called "zanies" by youth)-medicine normally used to treat anxiety or tension-went up nearly 50 percent in one year (700,000 in 1999 to 1 million in 2000).
More than 17 percent of adults over 60, wittingly or not, abuse prescription drugs.
In 2000, more than 19 million prescriptions for ADHD drugs were filled, a 72 percent increase since 1995. An estimated 3 to 5 percent of school-age children have ADHD. A study of students in Wisconsin and Minnesota showed 34 percent of ADHD youth age 11 to 18 report being approached to sell or trade their medicines, such as Ritalin.
Among 12- to 17-year-olds, girls are more likely than boys to use psycho therapeutic drugs non medically.
See full report http://ncadi.samhsa.gov/govpubs/prevalert/v6/4.aspx
These statistics are old by today's standard. I hate to imagine how bad it is today versus how it was in 2003. The abuse of prescription drugs is alarming but yet we focus on pot!
If we are a drug nation or a nation of drug users how can we sound credible to our children telling them to say no to drugs? Every third ad on TV is a drug ad telling you or someone you know to take a purple, yellow, white or pink pill for any ailment, mental anguish or anxiety, or funny feeling in the legs syndrome that may or may not have. You will get a quick fix because you deserve it. Don't forget to ask your doctor for our drugs and you can try them for free. What a business with a legal and some would argue safe delivery system of doling out billions of dollars for billions of pills flooding our homes every day and we wonder why our children do not listen to our message about drugs.
Every corner in America has a drug store. A retail drug outlet open 24 hours a day able to provide you with an endless supply of drugs in child proof containers churned out by some of the richest and biggest companies in the world. They spend every waking moment thinking of new ailments so they can design new drugs that they can freely flow them down the vast distribution network that they have created. And our government provides them tax breaks to develop these new drugs that puts most people in a stupor and really has no likelihood of curing them. I do not say that there are a not lot of great drugs that do great things for improving people's lives. What I am saying is that masquerading along side these legitimate drugs are the posers that do nothing more than inflate company profits and import drugs into our society and don our throats.
Exercise and diet can cure most of the today's health problems. We have a serious problem America and its your neighbor, your uncle, your wife or someone close to you that is abusing a legal substance on a daily basis.
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