Topic: prescription medications

Diversion to abuse has been significant. Currently methadone represents only some two percent of all opioid prescriptions, but it’s been implicated in an astounding one-third of all opioid fatalities.

We’re in a drug epidemic with no South American cartels or Afghan drug lords to vilify.

Instead of becoming inspired to turn his life around, he seems to have figured, “OK, crisis averted. Let’s go get a beer.”

For most of us, sleep problems are related to the recovery process itself, and the complex changes that occur as the brain heals following considerable abuse

Many of us already have painkillers sitting on a shelf in the bathroom medicine cabinet, alongside the aspirin and the allergy meds. Sometimes they’re unused from prior medical or dental problems.

People have abused opiates for 5,000 years. As much as medicine depends on them, they’ve always created problems for a percentage of users.

It took a while to develop effective guidelines for use of psychiatric meds with a population that was already addicted.

These powerful drugs have escaped the constraints of legal use and become widely misused

For these and other common procedures referred to in the study, we might not even know what the doctor prescribes Mom or Dad afterward.