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

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…..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."
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…..item 2)…. website … Time Magazine … Health … The New Drug Crisis: Addiction by Prescription

By Jeffrey Kluger Monday, Sept. 13, 2010

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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
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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.
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Inpatient Alcohol rehab centers are the kind of rehab centers which treats the patients who are severely addicted to alcohol and need 24 hours surveillance. During an inpatient treatment program the patient is kept under constant supervision. In this process the patient is kept in a different environment where they are kept under vigilance and proper care all the time.  Furthermore, the patients are being detoxified and proper medication is provided by the doctors. The programs here are well structured and follow a rigid routine format. In addition to proper medication, the patients are taught to adapt new situations and how to deal with the withdrawals that comes after quitting alcohol. Mostly inpatient alcohol treatment’s duration is 30 days but in some cases it can be stretched to 60 to 90 days also.

Some of the techniques used under this method are effective detoxification, abstinence, eating disorder treatment, pain treatment and guidance to deal with addiction. One of the first steps taken in this procedure is to detoxify the patient. It is the process where the alcohol residues are eliminated from your body and the body normalizes itself after becoming physically dependent on alcohol. This procedure follows a very strict regime and don’t give the patient any chance to run away from the rehab center. The patients have to follow a set of rules and instructions without any fail. Before taking such intense treatment the patients many a time have to go through an assessment test to prove that they can go through such a treatment. Some of the practices used during this treatment are:

•  Group therapy: During this therapy the addicted person can discuss their problems with others and got to learn things from them and build a social setting that crates a support system.

•  Reality therapy:  It teaches the person to control the things which they and to learn to deal with things which they cannot.

•  Cognitive behavioral therapy: It teaches the addicted person the actions can be controlled and moreover they should be controlled.

•  Psychotherapy: It finds about the underlying causes and triggers that provokes the addicted to drink and diagnoses co- occurring situations, manages denial

•  Family therapy: During this procedure the family member are involved and teaches them about how to cope with the addicted person in their family.

You should always have the knowledge that recovering from addiction to alcohol will take some good amount of time and won’t happen instantly. You need to give both the rehab center and the patient some time so that they can be able to cope with the addiction and recover from it efficiently and effectively. A large number of people have been benefited by taking services from these inpatient alcohol rehab centers. Since there are a good number of these rehab centers available nowadays, it is important on your part to do some enquiries and go for the one which you think is suitable for your needs and budget.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/7047791

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Some substance abuse treatment facilities specialize in what they provide. They may work only with one type of patient. They may offer services in a specific way such as inpatient. Or they may be associated with a particular religion or philosophical group.

People often think that they need to find a place that works specifically with their problem. If they are dependent on alcohol, they may want a facility that specializes in working with this type of patient. Those with prescription drug problems may search for a place that specifically states it works with these patients. Using a specialized facility is something many patients have success with but most facilities work with a variety of patients. Part of the reason is that chemical dependency shares specific characteristics no matter what substance is used. The second part is that many people need help with more than one issue.

Some people will need the services of inpatient substance abuse treatment facilities. These are the types where people stay for a period of time such as a week or months. There are people who need to be away from their daily lives in order to attain recovery and this can be a suitable option for them. Most people will opt to use outpatient services for a variety of reasons. This tends to cause less disruption overall to normal life. With most people having a job and possibly a partner or family, this type of treatment takes them away only part of the time.

Those who are considering treatment can find services several different ways. It is not uncommon for people to go to their employers EAP, or employee assistance program, to take the first step. Most human resources departments have this system and it is anonymous so people do not have to worry about others learning about their participation. This system helps people to access resources that their insurance carrier will pay for.

Others may turn to some type of facility locator. There are ones that are operated by the US Department of Health and Human Services as well as one that use generic search terms. Many facilities advertise on TV, radio and in various publications. People can contact them to get more information to find out about insurance coverage, time commitment required or other things they want to know more about.

Loved ones and concerned friends who are trying to find services for others need to be aware that this type of “help” usually does not work. Unless a person is ready to commit to treatment, getting them to go is not usually helpful. They will likely stop treatment or will not follow through with what they need to do to recover. Substance abuse treatment facilities are only useful to people who want to use them correctly.

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Alcoholism is a very powerful illness that can take over your entire body once it is constantly in your bloodstream. The body becomes so adjusted to having alcohol in the system that without it, it cannot function as it normally would. This is what causes withdrawal symptoms as someone attempts to quit drinking “cold turkey” and their body is no longer receiving doses of the drug it relies on so heavily. Withdrawal can be quite dangerous in fact because the body becomes so dependent on having alcohol in its system that it can shut down in ways that are fatal at times. With treatment at detox programs however, withdrawal symptoms can be minimized and in some cases eliminated.

Alcohol withdrawal symptoms can range from mild to very severe depending on how long a person has been drinking and the quantity that they normally drink. Mild symptoms include nervousness, anxiety, depression, difficulty focusing and fatigue. More moderate symptoms include physical problems like vomiting, insomnia, tremor, sweating and loss of appetite. If a person has been drinking heavily for many years symptoms can become very intense with hallucinations, convulsions or black out. The more severe symptoms should be treated professionally but anyone that attempts to quit drinking should consult a doctor even if they have not been an alcoholic for very long.

In order to minimize and avoid withdrawal symptoms as much as possible, detox programs can provide different types of services depending on how intense your withdrawal symptoms will be. Mild symptoms can be monitored with a staff member to ensure that your heart rate, temperature and blood pressure are at a secure level and you have enough fluids in your body to be safe. For more moderate or severe symptoms you can be treated with medication or even be sedated if the symptoms become life-threatening. Detox staff are experienced in dealing with all the various stages of withdrawal and can make sure that your safety and health are intact throughout the entire experience.

by floodllama

Alcohol detox centres provide a safe and structured environment in which to under treatment for alcohol related issues.

As society and pressures in daily lifestyles change for an ever growing population, more and more people are turning to alcohol in a bid to relax and take their minds off their problems. For many people, what starts off as a harmless drink or two in the evening can progress into a drink problem.

For some people, they suddenly find that they are unable to stop drinking on their own and so turn to the help of an alcohol detox centres. These centres are able to offer all the help and support needed for anyone wishing to stop drinking but unable to do so without the medical and emotional support of alcohol detox centres.

There are a number of alcohol detox centres spread up and down the country and all offer various degrees of accommodation, facilities, length of time for a treatment programme but fundamentally, they all offer the chance to help you stop drinking once and for all.

Most alcohol detox centres offer a detox programme which usually lasts between 7 to 14 days depending on the severity of the alcohol related issue. The alcohol detox centres tend of have staff on hand 24/7 during a detox programme as withdrawing from alcohol can have risks and medical supervision is highly recommended.

Alcohol detox centres offer medication to the client so that they can withdraw from alcohol in a comfortable and safe environment. For some people with a drink problem, it can be dangerous to try and stop drinking without any medical support or supervision. Some of the risks involved are fits, shakes, vomiting etc.

Some alcohol detox centres focus purely on a short-term stay based on the client purely undergoing a detox from alcohol. Others offer a detox programme followed by the option of undergoing a treatment programme over the course of 28 days and up to 3 months. These programmes are designed to help you withdraw from alcohol initially and then undergo treatment with highly qualified counsellors and therapists to help you stay off alcohol for good.

Of course, its all dependent on what is the right treatment for you but whether you decide to stay on to do a treatment programme, a detox programme initially at alcohol detox centres is the first step to helping you with any alcohol related issues.