Maxim Magazine (December 2008) – Jiah Khan … “Pharmageddon”: America’s New Drug Crisis — better living through better chemistry (September 4, 2011) …

Image by marsmet552
Krantz, medical director of the Hanley Center, a drug treatment center in West Palm Beach, Fla., explained to "Early Show on Saturday Morning" co-anchor Rebecca Jarvisthat, "It definitely is a pandemic in the United States today, and we got there, essentially, in the late 1990s, there was a paradigm shift for treating chronic pain.

And at the same time there was direct consumer advertising. So, it made the perfect storm. People now were going to their physicians, and they have arthritis, the weekend warriors, the baby boomers, and they’re saying, ‘I have this pain,’ and doctors are over-prescribing.
.

…….*****All images are copyrighted by their respective authors ……

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
.
…..item 1)…. website … CBS NEWS … The Early Show …

September 4, 2010 11:01 PM

"Pharmageddon": America’s New Drug Crisis
By CBSNews

www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/09/04/earlyshow/saturday/mai...

(CBS) A new drug problem is emerging in the United States: an alarming national epidemic of pill popping and prescription drug abuse so bad it’s being called "Pharmageddon."

The latest issue of Time magazine has numbers painting a disturbing picture: Over the last two decades, deaths from accidental drug overdoses have increased five-fold. And, for the first time, unintentional overdoses have replaced car accidents as the leading cause of accidental death in 15 states and the District of Columbia.

It’s a problem Dr. Barbra Krantz describes as "the perfect storm."

Krantz, medical director of the Hanley Center, a drug treatment center in West Palm Beach, Fla., explained to "Early Show on Saturday Morning" co-anchor Rebecca Jarvisthat, "It definitely is a pandemic in the United States today, and we got there, essentially, in the late 1990s, there was a paradigm shift for treating chronic pain. And at the same time there was direct consumer advertising. So, it made the perfect storm. People now were going to their physicians, and they have arthritis, the weekend warriors, the baby boomers, and they’re saying, ‘I have this pain,’ and doctors are over-prescribing.

"The most at risk are not the street junkies, the typical stereotype that you would think of, but the people that are working, that are educated, that have had professions that are now looking for that better living through better chemistry."

Ron Dash, a former Hanley patient and a recovering prescription drug addict, told Jarvis, "For me, it started at a very young age, at the age of 10. I had some anxiety problems and I was given a prescription for Phenobarbital. I believe that set me off in the direction of not dealing with things that bothered me and going to doctors and asking for a quick fix, something to help me feel better. Over the course of my youth, growing up in the ’60s, the culture was encouraging towards social drug use. As I got into my professional career, as a professional businessman, I went to doctors and I got prescriptions for stress, and it just mushroomed and progressed from there. At the age of — my first surgery, I was given a prescription medication for pain, Vicodin. And as I grew older, I just became slowly more and more dependent on taking medications to help me cope, get up for work and get through my day."

Krantz said there are definite signs someone could be addicted to prescription drugs:

Activities abandoned or reduced: "There’s a progressive isolation that occurs in their life. Where they get to is that the drug is the only thing that’s important to them, obtaining the drug."

Dependence on the drug: "Dependence, tolerance, withdrawal is another sign," Krantz said.

Duration or amount greater than intended, intra-personal consequences — that they can’t cut down or control it. And when it becomes time-consuming: "What happens," Krantz said, "is that the person finds themselves needing to take more of the prescription drug than intended or prescribed, and then they’re taking friends, or they’re asking friends for their drugs. We saw a serious increase in the baby boomer drug addict. About 70 percent of our patients at Hanley are baby boomers. We have special program for them now."
.
.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
.
…..item 2)…. website … Time Magazine … Health … The New Drug Crisis: Addiction by Prescription

By Jeffrey Kluger Monday, Sept. 13, 2010

…………………………………………..

img code photo……skull and crossbones with tons of prescription pills

img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2010/1009/wdrugs_0913.jpg

Stephen Lewis for TIME
…………………………………………..

www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2015763,00.html

Update Appended: Sept. 17, 2010

It’s not easy to find a mother who would look back fondly on the time her son had cancer. But Penny (not her real name) does. Penny lives in Boston, and her son got sick when he was just 13. He struggled with the disease for several years — through the battery of tests and the horror of the diagnosis and, worst of all, through the pain that came from the treatment. For that last one, at least, there was help — Oxycontin, a time-released opioid that works for up to 12 hours. It did the job, and more.

The brain loves Oxycontin — the way the drug lights up the limbic system, with cascading effects through the ventral striatum, midbrain, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex and prefrontal cortex, leaving pure pleasure in its wake. What the brain loves, it learns to crave. That’s especially so when the alternative is the cruel pain of cancer therapy. By the time Penny’s son was 17, his cancer was licked — but his taste for Oxy wasn’t. When his doctor quit prescribing him the stuff, the boy found the next best — or next available — thing: heroin. Penny soon began spending her Monday nights at meetings of the support group Learn to Cope, a Boston-based organization that counsels families of addicts, particularly those hooked on opioids or heroin.

(See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2009.)

"Penny told the group that she actually misses her son’s cancer," says Joanne Peterson, the founder of Learn to Cope. "When he had that, everyone was around. When he had that, he had support."

Penny and her son are not unique. Humans have never lacked for ways to get wasted. The natural world is full of intoxicating leaves and fruits and fungi, and for centuries, science has added to the pharmacopoeia. In the past two decades, that’s been especially true. As the medical community has become more attentive to acute and chronic pain, a bounty of new drugs has rolled off Big Pharma’s production line.

There was fentanyl, a synthetic opioid around since the 1960s that went into wide use as a treatment for cancer pain in the 1990s. That was followed by Oxycodone, a short-acting drug for more routine pain, and after that came Oxycontin, a 12-hour formulation of the same powerful pill. Finally came hydrocodone, sold under numerous brand names, including Vicodin. Essentially the same opioid mixed with acetaminophen, hydrocodone seemed like health food compared with its chemical cousins, and it has been regulated accordingly. The government considers hydrocodone a Schedule III drug — one with a "moderate or low" risk of dependency, as opposed to Schedule II’s, which carry a "severe" risk. Physicians must submit a written prescription for Schedule II drugs; for Schedule III’s, they just phone the pharmacy. (Schedule I substances are drugs like heroin that are never prescribed.) For patients, that wealth of choices spelled danger.

(See the most common hospital mishaps.)

"If someone is dying, addiction isn’t a problem," says Dr. Jim Rathmell, chief of the division of pain medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. "But for prescribers, the distinction between a patient who has three or four weeks to live and one who’s 32 and has chronic back pain started to blur."

The result has hardly been a surprise. Since 1990, there has been a tenfold increase in prescriptions for opioids in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2007, 3.7 million people filled 21 million legal prescriptions for opioid painkillers, and 5.2 million people over the age of 12 reported using prescription painkillers nonmedically in the previous month, according to a survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). From 2004 to ’08, emergency-room visits for opioid misuse doubled. At the same time, the drugs have become the stuff of pop culture, gaining cachet in the process. The fictitious Dr. House and Nurse Jackie gobble them like gumdrops, as did the decidedly nonfictional Rush Limbaugh and Heath Ledger. And, like Ledger, some users don’t make it out alive.

In 1990 there were barely 6,000 deaths from accidental drug poisoning in the U.S. By 2007 that number had nearly quintupled, to 27,658. In 15 states and the District of Columbia, unintentional overdoses have, for the first time in modern memory, replaced motor-vehicle incidents as the leading cause of accidental death; and in three more states it’s close to a tie.

Watch TIME’s video "Forget to Take Your Pills? Don’t Worry, They’ll Call You."

See how to prevent illness at any age.
.
.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
.
.

Treatment Center Finder Expands Their Addiction Hotline
Treatment Center Finder is battling addiction on the front lines seven days a week. To handle this growing problem, the company's addiction hotline has expanded into 6 new states, bringing the total states covered by their services up to 12 states …
Read more on PR Web (press release)

Zona Seca Closing Drug Treatment Center in Lompoc
An alcohol- and drug-treatment and recovery program that has made its home in the city of Lompoc for more than a decade will shut its doors at the end of the week because of a loss of funding. Zona Seca, which has had a location in Santa Barbara for …
Read more on Noozhawk

New Leukemia Medicines Bring Chemotherapy-Free Potential (2)
New medicines from Gilead Sciences Inc. (GILD:US), Roche Holding AG (ROG), Pharmacyclics Inc. (PCYC:US) and others are poised to reshape treatment of the most common form of leukemia among adults, potentially eliminating chemotherapy from …
Read more on Businessweek

New Arthritis Treatment: Flexiseq, Drug-Free Gel, May Alleviate Joint Pain …
"Current approaches to treating this chronic pain are inadequate, and we are interested in the potential of this new drug-free approach," said Dr. Liam O'Toole, chief executive, Arthritis Research UK, about Flexiseq in the press release. Unlike several …
Read more on Medical Daily

Question by : help! I have a huge internet addiction?
It’s REALLY bad!! I can’t seem to stop!!

*every* night the same thing happens: my husband goes to sleep before me, (very quickly too), so I no longer am rushed to go to bed. In fact, I feel liberated. I get on the computer to watch “just one funny video” or look at “just one site”, and tell myself I really just want to go to bed. I was tired before, but slowly, I become intrigued like a child in a playground..
…
and before I know it, I have stayed up THE WHOLE NIGHT browsing, commenting on videos, sometimes writing on the computer, doing research on topics online. It’s awful!
I want to stop wasting my time!! I don’t want to comment on videos, look at numerous sites and do this! Why am I doing this?!
Do you guys think chronic pain has something to do with it? or maybe, unfulfillment during the day time?
It could be coupled with a “night” addiction…I love the night..
I’m 22 years old
the chronic pain is from a phlebotomy injury a year ago

Best answer:

Answer by Myqerem Tafaj
Tell your husband to disconnect the internet from your computer, password protect it, so you can only surf at a certain limit.

Give your answer to this question below!

Question by : help! I have a huge internet addiction?
It’s REALLY bad!! I can’t seem to stop!!

*every* night the same thing happens: my husband goes to sleep before me, (very quickly too), so I no longer am rushed to go to bed. In fact, I feel liberated. I get on the computer to watch “just one funny video” or look at “just one site”, and tell myself I really just want to go to bed. I was tired before, but slowly, I become intrigued like a child in a playground..
…
and before I know it, I have stayed up THE WHOLE NIGHT browsing, commenting on videos, sometimes writing on the computer, doing research on topics online. It’s awful!
I want to stop wasting my time!! I don’t want to comment on videos, look at numerous sites and do this! Why am I doing this?!
Do you guys think chronic pain has something to do with it? or maybe, unfulfillment during the day time?
It could be coupled with a “night” addiction…I love the night..
I’m 22 years old
the chronic pain is from a phlebotomy injury a year ago

Best answer:

Answer by Myqerem Tafaj
Tell your husband to disconnect the internet from your computer, password protect it, so you can only surf at a certain limit.

Give your answer to this question below!

Question by : help! I have a huge internet addiction?
It’s REALLY bad!! I can’t seem to stop!!

*every* night the same thing happens: my husband goes to sleep before me, (very quickly too), so I no longer am rushed to go to bed. In fact, I feel liberated. I get on the computer to watch “just one funny video” or look at “just one site”, and tell myself I really just want to go to bed. I was tired before, but slowly, I become intrigued like a child in a playground..
…
and before I know it, I have stayed up THE WHOLE NIGHT browsing, commenting on videos, sometimes writing on the computer, doing research on topics online. It’s awful!
I want to stop wasting my time!! I don’t want to comment on videos, look at numerous sites and do this! Why am I doing this?!
Do you guys think chronic pain has something to do with it? or maybe, unfulfillment during the day time?
It could be coupled with a “night” addiction…I love the night..
I’m 22 years old
the chronic pain is from a phlebotomy injury a year ago

Best answer:

Answer by Myqerem Tafaj
Tell your husband to disconnect the internet from your computer, password protect it, so you can only surf at a certain limit.

Add your own answer in the comments!