Wow. Here’s a story about Samantha – a 22 year old girl who’s been addicted to OxyContin for two years. And it all started when a co-worker offered her a quick fix for her headache. Soon she was paying between $40 and $80 per pill, to the same co-worker. She then began embezzling from her workplace, Costco, to be able to afford the pills. The co-worker had a prescription for them for an old injury that no longer hurt. But she lied to her doctor and kept getting the pills, and sold them to Samantha.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t look like the co-worker is being prosecuted – which I find absolutely unbelievable. She broke the law, and really endangered someone’s life in the process. And now she might be going to jail.

We can assume that Samantha is now getting help through an addiction treatment center, but this shows you just how easy it is to get hooked. Perfectly innocent circumstances on the part of the addict – she just wanted to get rid of her headaches – that turned into a disaster.

Do you know anyone with an OxyContin addiction or dependency? Or another prescription drug addiction? If so, do them a favor and help them get into treatment before their life is ruined, too.

Popularity: 19% [?]

The 8th, 10th and 11th-graders in Fond du Lac (Wisconsin) county took a survey – 16% admitted to having taken prescription drugs without a prescription in the year prior. That’s almost one out of every five kids. To address the problem, the county has formed a task force to educate 6th graders about the dangers of prescription drugs, including the very real potential of prescription drug addicton, overdose, etc.

They’re hoping to nip the problem in the bud so as the kids get older they’ll refuse the drugs when offered to them, or won’t hear about them and check out their parent’s medicine cabinet so see what they can find.

The high school drama class is participating – they’re putting on skits that demonstrate the problem.

Of course, that doesn’t do anything for the older kids currently taking them, or for the young adults who tend to take even more prescription drugs in college if they started earlier.

Prescription drugs can be very difficult to quit taking – the withdrawal effects are sometimes even worse than street drugs, and it can be dangerous. Which is why doctors and drug labels warn that you should not try to stop taking some of them without help.

Many of those young adults will need help through an addiction treatment center. Any parent who knows their kids are taking them should look for help right away. People tend to think that prescription drugs are safe because they came from a doctor or because their parents take them. Just one pill can be bad enough – you never really know how someone will react to a particular drug – but because they know nothing about the drugs and think they’re safe, they can easily take higher dosages or combine them with other pills – both of which can be deadly.

Hopefully, the task force will also get that point across and prevent a lot of disasters. Those whose kids are already taking them should get some addiction help.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Methamphetamine addiction is one of the worst drug problems around. Meth can change a healthy, nice-looking person into a wreck in a couple of months. Longer than that, and they can literally become unrecognizable. Check out these before and after methamphetamine shots. It’s clear that some of these people will never look the same again.

A lot of communities have started campaigns to get rid of meth. They educate the general public, teachers, parents and officials on the signs of meth use and what can be done about it.

There are various tools to help you do the same in your community. The movie Crystal Darkness is a good one. It consists of about 75 interviews with meth addicts and others and has graphic images showing what can happen to someone on meth. They’re pretty startling, but they’re real. And people need to know that anyone who messes around with meth is going to look like that- and live like that.

The film is available, with different versions for different states, at www.crystaldarkness.com. If you want help get rid of meth in your community, get a copy of the DVD and take it upon yourself to get it shown at schools, etc. Also get in touch with your local government to see what other community showings can be arranged. Once government officials see it, they’ll want to help.

Anyone who knows someone who’s using meth should get them into an addiction treatment center as fast as possible. Meth takes it toll quickly and the worse it gets, the lower the chances of that person ever looking the same again.

Popularity: 15% [?]

I have to say this – it’s disgusting the way we treat our troops. Here’s a story about drug addicted soldiers who became addicted when they were prescribed painkillers to handle the pain incurred while fighting for their country and the freedom of those on foreign soil. Some of them have gone the way of other drug addicts – obtaining the pills illegally and giving or selling them to other soliders in the same boat.

Now they’re being treated like criminals – going to prison, dishonorable discharges, etc. – when they were not taken care of in the first place and were set up to turn into drug addicts by military medical personnel.

They’re not even being treated as well as non-violent drug offenders in drug courts.

According to military records, legal painkiller use has increased 70% since the Iraq war started 6 years ago. Now the soldiers have developed a prescription drug addiction  – which was totally predictable and almost impossible to avoid when you need them for longer than a week or two – which you do when you’ve been badly injured in a bomb explosion – and they’re looking for help.

They need to be in an addiction treatment center and, instead, they’re going to jail.

Disgusting.

Do you know a solider with a drug problem? Call us, we’ll find a way to help.

Popularity: 14% [?]

A recent article about drug addiction in the UK said that heroin dealers aren’t getting jail time like they used to. Government officials argue that drug use is down so the leniency is paying off. Is it really?

The only thing they seem to be gauging that on is the number of seizures of drugs – that’s one of the measurements we use in the U.S. as well. In the UK it’s down 15%. It’s also down in the U.S.

But does that really mean the drug situation is improving? It could mean there are fewer police on the job, or that dealers are getting smarter. It might also be because people are tending to switch to prescription drugs instead of street drugs. In some parts of the U.S., more people are showing up at an addiction treatment center for prescription drugs than for heroin, cocaine, speed and all the other illegal drugs put together.

Of course, the U.S. government - and, I assume, the UK government – wants to make it look like they’re doing a good job. So, it’s pretty convenient to have those statistics go down.

Unfortunately, the use of prescription drugs is not often considered.  Dealers, and those taking the drugs, are harder to locate. People often get the drugs from doctors or their friends.

One way or another, the problem still exists. But to get a real idea of what’s going on, prescription drug addiction and abuse must be included.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Washington state is having trouble with prescription drug addiction and abuse, but has not yet implemented the approved prescription drug monitoring plan that would allow doctors, pharmacists, law enforcement and other officials to see if people are ‘doctor shopping’ – going from one doctor to another faking symptoms to get drugs, which are then often sold to others. The reason? They don’t have the $680,000 it will cost to get it rolling.

My suggestion? Do an assessment of how many prisoners are incarcerated for non-violent drug-related crime, get them out of jail and into an addiction treatment center where they can get help, and use the money they saved to put the database in place.

It’s far less expensive to get someone through rehab than keep them in jail – not to mention the fact that they’ll be helped to get off drugs, which is often the reason they committed the crime in the first place, turn them back into contributing members of society, cut down on the overall drug use in the state, and lower the crime rate in general.

Why aren’t more states doing this?

Popularity: 14% [?]

Tomorrow is Inauguration Day – this time it’s for Obama. Boy, has he got a mess to clean up. He’s going to need a lot of money to turn this country around.

Being a special advisor to the president (joke), I have some suggestions.  The first, and the last, and everything in between, involves handling the nation’s drug problem, including prescription drug addiction and abuse.

Why is this such a big issue? Because it’s costing us a lot of money – it costs the country billions of dollars to house prison inmates who are there for drug-related crime, health care, emergency services, etc. etc. etc., that could be spent on elsewhere – and it represents a lot of people who are going to be part of the nation’s problems instead of part of the solutions.

And, as both Obama and Biden have made very clear, it’s going to take a shoulder to shoulder grassroots effort, in addition to changes in government, to make the changes we need. That’s not going to happen when a large percentage of the population is too drugged to be effective – and I’m including prescription drugs, even those we get from our doctor (but, somehow, we stay on them for months or years with no real medical reason behind it – we’re addicted.)

Changing the country has to start with changing ourselves – our own lives. You can start by getting someone you care about into an addiction treatment center so they can change theirs.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Some guys in prison have said it’s just as easy to get drugs in prison as it is in the street. Inmates with contacts in the outside world somehow get them smuggled in.  And sometimes you hear about criminal prison guards who help them out. But the latest is he medical director of the Sacramento County Jail – he’s been writing prescriptions for high dosages of OxyContin like it’s going out of style. And after a seven month investigation, he’s been arrested. God knows how many prisoners are going through withdrawal now – many had probably developed a prescription drug addiction.

I wrote a blog the other day about a man whose son was a heroin addict. At his wits end, he had convinced his son to turn himself into the police for violation of his parole. The dad felt that if his son was in prison for a year he would at least know his son was not somewhere shooting up, and overdosing on, heroin.

Well, that’s not going to work with medical directors like Sac County Jail’s.

OxyContin, which is an opiate, just like heroin, and can addict and kill people just as easily – Purdue Pharma was fined $634 million for falsely promoting that it was safer than other opiate painkillers – is something that dad would definitely have to worry about. And because his son was already a heroin addict, there’s a good chance he would have overdosed on OxyContin while in prison..

As it was, the boy overdosed the night before he was going to turn himself in. He probably thought he’d have a little more for the road – knowing it was likely to be his last for a year or so. But it was his last forever.

Don’t delay getting anyone you know with a drug problem into an addiction treatment center. You never know what will happen tomorrow and if it’s prison, you can’t count on any help.

Popularity: 14% [?]

A news item on CBS about a doctor, a former alcoholic, says he’s trying to get support for the drug that cured his alcoholism. The drug was a muscle relaxant. He says it got to the cause of the problem – the reason he drank in the first place – and he no longer wants to drink. He doesn’t need addiction treatment – he’s fixed.

But there’s a major thing being overlooked here: what this doctor said was that the drug handled his anxiety, which he says was the reason he was drinking. But the drug didn’t cure his alcoholism – getting rid of his anxiety cured his alcoholism.

I don’t know if his anxiety was physical or mental. If it was physical, then he found the cause of the problem – which amounts to some form of physical pain. If it was mental/emotional, he didn’t find the cause of the problem, he took a drug that relieved the symptoms. And the question still remains, what caused the anxiety in the first place?

That’s what you find out in a good addiction treatment center, and they will help you relieve it, not with drugs, but by getting down to the bottom of the problem and actually helping you figure out how to handle the issues that cause the anxiety.

Whether someone’s addicted to drugs or alcohol, there’s an underlying anxiety that needs to be addressed. Taking another drug to do that isn’t a solution. It doesn’t make the person’s life any better, it just makes them immune to the fact that they’re miserable.

And they often wind up with a prescription drug addiction problem, instead of the problem they had with alcohol or some other drug. And they’re basically in the same boat they were in before. Except that being addicted to prescription drugs, which they get from their doctor, is more socially acceptable than being an alcoholic or ’druggie.’

Nevertheless, they think they’re cured.

The only reason this phenomena doesn’t completely boggle my mind is that I understand the lengths drug companies go to, spending billions of dollars, to create the illusion that prescription drugs are a good thing.

Unless they’re saving a life, they’re not.

Popularity: 11% [?]

Of the three former county officials/employees involved in recent prescription drug scandals, only one was ordered to rehab and 30 days in jail. The others, unbelievably, were sentenced to several years in prison but were also given a few years probation – which they serve first and, if they get through that, they may never serve any time in jail at all.

One of them was charged with possession with intent to sell within 2,000 feet of a park or school.

Here we are – drug rehab centers filling with prescription drug addiction clients and prescription drug abuse becoming one of the worst problems among the country’s young people, and these former government employees are getting off basically scott-free.

And the only reason anyone even found out about it is because one of them was having an affair with another and when her husband found out he killed himself.

Why would the judge give these people a break? It’s not as if they’re otherwise upstanding citizens, pillars of the community who made a little mistake.

These are the kind of people who wouldn’t even be considered eligible for an addiction treatment center through a drug court. And only one of them was even ordered to rehab.

I don’t know if things would have been any different if the drugs were street drugs, but I do know that if we’re going to handle the prescription drug addiction problem, we’re going to have to take it a lot more seriously than that judge is. Wake up!

Popularity: 10% [?]