Prescription Drug Abuse Up– Dramatically
Filed under: Advertising & Lobbying, Drugs & Medical Devices, Prescription Drugs
I wrote the other day that I was “generally suspicious of the pharmaceutical zeitgeist. And terribly so as it concerns myself.” The following, I suppose, is that zeitgeist’s underbelly. Reuters reports:
U.S. officials reported a 400 percent increase over 10 years in the proportion of Americans treated for prescription painkiller abuse and said on Thursday the problem cut across age groups, geography and income.
The dramatic jump was higher than treatment admission rates for methamphetamine abuse, which doubled, and marijuana, which increased by almost half, according to figures from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
They said 9.8 percent of hospital admissions for substance abuse in 2008 involved painkillers, up from 2.2 percent in 1998. The percentage of people admitted to treatment for alcohol dropped by 5 percent and for cocaine dropped by 16 percent over the same period.
The report, which is brief and chock full of interesting charts and graphs, can be found here.
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