Prescription Drugs

44,000 people died from overdose on drugs in the US which is almost twice the number from 1999. Of that 44,000 around 52% were from prescription drugs. One person dies from a drug overdose every 19 seconds in the US. Opioid pain relievers killed more people from overdose than cocaine and heroin combined. The older people are in more risk than the young. With things such as alzheimer's disease especially for those who live alone it could be easy to forget and take too much medicine. Though it isn’t brought to the spotlight many elderly are medicated to death. Although their death certificate may say things like stroke or heart attack it is really the result of daily drug doses that overwhelmed their vitals. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared prescription drug abuse an epidemic in the United States and when that happens you know it’s serious. All states except Missouri now have a drug monitoring program. Now with Obamacare even the poor have health insurance which is a great thing, although now more and more people are using prescription drugs.

Some prescription pain relievers are known opioids which are highly addictive. There are many other classes of drugs which are known to be addictive. Overdose is often a result of taking more medication to ease the pain after taking the medication for years has built your tolerance. These drugs are also used as recreational to get ‘high’ or to ‘escape’. This making it seem like they can use drugs in a socially accepted way or without fear of getting caught with some kind of drug such as heroin or methamphetamine. These drugs are prescribed to millions of people and their effect is killing our society. While medical marijuana has zero deaths and few known side effects it is illegal in this country. Medical marijuana could take place of thousands of these prescribed drugs but since it is illegal it is hard to do testing and find the results of marijuana. I believe if marijuana was legal the rates of deaths from prescription drugs would decrease greatly and so would addiction rates.