Across US Unregulated Prescribing Means Abuse Of Opioid Drugs Hit All-Time High

One after another, media are waking up to what drug enforcement and police have known for some time. When you lose a large number of people to painkiller overdoses, you have to admit that abuse of opioid drugs hit an all-time high.

The latest news source to compile information on the epidemic is the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In its story of July 3, 2012, this newspaper reports on the hundreds of millions of prescriptions for opioid drugs that are being written each year, and the more than ten thousand babies that are now born addicted to these drugs annually.

The epidemic has been growing since the mid-1990s when new painkillers hit the market. Perhaps it’s ironic or maybe it reveals the motivation of the pharmaceutical companies that at the same time, magazine articles began to complain about inadequate treatment for pain. Match up this type of editorial with new painkillers on the market and plenty of people suffering from pain are going to march to their doctors’ offices and ask for pain medication.

Lack of Education Breeds Today’s Problems

The lack of education existed both in the practitioner and in the patient. While the practitioner should have been educated on how to treat pain properly, many were not. Pharmaceutical companies encouraged the lack of proper training by promoting off-label uses, which means uses for which the drug was not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Salespeople were instructed to claim that these new drugs were far less addictive than earlier painkillers, claims that caught up to Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer of Oxycontin. In 2007, executives of Purdue were fined more than $630 million for their misleading sales techniques.

It is noted that this money did not go into programs to help those who had become addicted to Oxycontin. And it could not buy back the lives of those who had overdosed on these drugs.

Finding Help At A Narconon Center

Instead of this huge fine funding a concerted effort to help those who were in danger of losing everything to addiction, families with a loved one at risk of overdose had to search for the right kind of help. Some families trusted short-term programs, but for many people, a month or so in rehab does little more than give a person “clean time”, that is, time away from using drugs. Unless they have a way to reduce the cravings for drugs and methods of rebuilding a life that was destroyed by drug use, many people will not be able to maintain this sobriety.

The Narconon program provides a long-term program that really zeroes in on the root causes of that addiction. When those bonds are broken, a person can hold into that sobriety after they go home. This approach has shown to be successful with countless individuals over the past five decades.

It takes work, it takes thorough detoxification to help with cravings, and it takes new life skills. Addiction routinely destroys life skills as it destroys relationships and personal integrity. Each of these aspects of addiction are addressed, each person in recovery is guided through the process of repair and restoration that is needed to leave addiction far behind. Find out how the Narconon program can help someone you love.