70 MILLION AMERICANS TAKING MIND-ALTERING DRUGS
David Kupelian
The heroin-overdose death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has caused the media to focus, however fleetingly, on America’s drug problem.
News accounts of the Oscar-winner’s tragic demise typically reference the startling increase in heroin-related deaths in the last four to five years. The problem, reporters explain, is the vast number of Americans addicted to prescription pain meds like OxyContin, many of whom discover heroin to be both cheaper and easier to obtain than the prescription opioid drugs to which they initially became addicted.
That’s accurate as far as it goes. But by following the trail further, we arrive at a place far more shocking and consequential. We discover that not only has the traditional distinction between illegal “street drugs” and legal “therapeutic prescription drugs” become so blurred as to be almost nonexistent, but between America’s twin drug epidemics – one illegal, the other legal – well over 70 million Americans are using mind-altering drugs. And that number doesn’t include abusers of alcohol, which adds an additional 60 million Americans. So we’re really talking about 130 million strung-out Americans. How is this possible?
Of course, most of the drug news we’ve heard lately has been about pot. It started with medical marijuana, with state after state successfully defying the federal ban. Then on Jan. 1, flat-out legalization took center stage, when Colorado and Washington opened their doors to exhilarated pot-smokers, while numerous other states – from Alaska, Oregon and California in the west to Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., in the east – announced plans to push for legalization in the coming months.
As a result, stock prices for cannabis companies soared (“The demand for marijuana is insatiable,” says one entrepreneur, “you have a feeding frenzy for the birth of a new industry”), the New York City-based publication “High Times” announced a new private-equity fund to “raise $100 million over the next two years to invest in cannabis-related businesses,” and ad agencies geared up to support “an industry estimated to already be generating revenues in the billions of dollars.”
The dramatic change in Americans’ attitude is reflected in a recent CNN poll headlined “Support for legal marijuana soaring.”
Somehow, in all the hoopla, it apparently doesn’t register that pot use lowers the IQ of young people. A massive, four-decade study published in 2012 by the National Academy of Sciences, titled “Persistent cannabis users show neuropsychological decline from childhood to midlife,” followed more than 1,000 subjects from birth until age 38! The researchers’ core finding? Repeated marijuana use by teenagers lowers their IQ – permanently.
Yet, according to a 2010 study by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, over 22 million Americans use illegal drugs,
Yet, according to a 2010 study by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, over 22 million Americans use illegal drugs, comprising marijuana/hashish, cocaine (including crack), heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants and prescription-type psychiatric and opioid drugs used without a prescription. And of those, fully half admit to driving on the public roadways under the influence of drugs!
Of course, when we think of driving “under the influence,” our minds turn to alcohol, so fasten your seatbelts: In 2010, nearly one-quarter of all Americans aged 12 and up participated in binge drinking, about 58.6 million people, and heavy drinking was reported for 16.9 million people. And an estimated 11.4 percent of persons 12 or older drove under the influence of alcohol at least once in the past year.
Bottom line, according to HHS: “In an average year 30 million Americans drive drunk [and] 10 million drive impaired by illicit drugs.”
‘Fastest growing drug problem’
So with more than 22 million Americans stupefied on illegal drugs and another 58 million with a serious drinking problem – that’s 80 million souls – and 40 million of them driving under the influence of intoxicants, the nation undeniably suffers from a massive “substance-abuse” problem.
But there is another parallel drug problem, the devastation of which is arguably just as severe and detrimental to American society as that involving illegal drugs and alcohol abuse – and some would say it’s actually worse.
And that is the astonishingly vast, and rapidly increasing, number of people taking medically prescribed but poorly understood, mind-altering psychiatric drugs. Indeed, today one in five adults – approximately 50 million Americans – take prescription psychiatric drugs.
Ironically, after marijuana (which is rapidly becoming legal), the most-abused drugs in America are prescription drugs, obtained and used “non-medically,” that is, without a prescription from a doctor.
As revealed in a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in one recent year “approximately 27,000 unintentional drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States, one death every 19 minutes.”
“Prescription drug abuse,” announced the CDC, “is the fastest growing drug problem in the United States.”
The skyrocketing rate of drug-overdose death rates “has been driven,” says the report, “by increased use of a class of prescription drugs called opioid analgesics” – drugs like hydrocodone (brand names Norco, Vicodin), hydromorphone (Dilaudid, Exalgo), oxycodone (OxyContin, Percocet) and morphine (Astramorph, Avinza).
“Opioid analgesics suppress your perception of pain,” explains WebMD, “and calm your emotional response to pain by reducing the number of pain signals sent by the nervous system and the brain’s reaction to those pain signals.”
For the last decade, “more overdose deaths have involved opioid analgesics than heroin and cocaine combined,” reports the CDC. In addition, “for every unintentional overdose death related to an opioid analgesic, nine persons are admitted for substance abuse treatment, 35 visit emergency departments, 161 report drug abuse or dependence, and 461 report nonmedical uses of opioid analgesics.” In other words, it’s an epidemic.
America’s traditional drug paradigm has long been something like this: On the one hand is the respectable, legal, medical world where enlightened doctors prescribe their patients wonder drugs that relieve their symptoms and make them feel more comfortable – OxyContin, anti-anxiety drugs (Valium, Xanax), sleeping pills, stimulants, mood stabilizers and, more recently, marijuana, hallucinogens and so forth.
On the other hand is the sleazy, criminal world of drug pushers who supply low-life users and addicts with drugs to satiate their habits, make them feel better and relieve their stresses, troubles and anxieties – drugs like OxyContin and other illegally obtained psych meds, marijuana, stimulants, cocaine, hallucinogens and so forth.
If the distinction between legal and illegal seems disturbingly indistinct and fluid – in some ways even unreal – keep reading, because it gets much more bizarre.
Creating ‘zombies’
A recent news story originating at The Fix, which features coverage on addiction and recovery, had this interesting headline:
“America’s Number One Prescription Sleep Aid Could Trigger ‘Zombies,’ Murder and Other Disturbing Behavior.”
The report includes true stories of murderers and other offenders who had taken the popular sleeping pill Ambien – classified as a “hypnotic” drug – and relates how their defense lawyers successfully argued that adverse drug effects from Ambien should be considered a mitigating factor. The drug reached national notoriety in 2006 when then-Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., had a bizarre nighttime car crash, telling police he was running late for a vote (which actually had occurred six hours earlier) and that, because he took Ambien, he had no recollection of the night’s events.
The current Ambien label reads as follows (see Page 20):
What is the most important information I should know about AMBIEN?
After taking AMBIEN, you may get up out of bed while not being fully awake and do an activity that you do not know you are doing. The next morning, you may not remember that you did anything during the night. You have a higher chance for doing these activities if you drink alcohol or take other medicines that make you sleepy with AMBIEN. Reported activities include:
driving a car (“sleep-driving”)
making and eating food
talking on the phone
having sex
sleep-walking
Let’s be clear: This is not fine print about “rare adverse events” (negative side effects that occur in less than one in 1,000 people taking a medication). These are instructions given to users of Ambien describing what they should expect.
So, drugging people into becoming sleepwalking, sleep-driving, sleep-eating, sleep-talking and sleep-sexing zombies with no memory of what they have done while in a hypnotic trance, this is a good thing? Really?
In case that went by too fast (or in the event you were on Ambien and slept through it), we are talking about “sleep-driving”! The frequency of motor vehicle accidents caused by people on Ambien is reportedly why the FDA is now recommending women take lower doses of such sleep aids, which were prescribed for Americans 60 million times in 2011.
continued
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/70-million-americans-taking-mind-altering-drugs/#1JlbQgJRr0bABf0K.99
David Kupelian
The heroin-overdose death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has caused the media to focus, however fleetingly, on America’s drug problem.
News accounts of the Oscar-winner’s tragic demise typically reference the startling increase in heroin-related deaths in the last four to five years. The problem, reporters explain, is the vast number of Americans addicted to prescription pain meds like OxyContin, many of whom discover heroin to be both cheaper and easier to obtain than the prescription opioid drugs to which they initially became addicted.
That’s accurate as far as it goes. But by following the trail further, we arrive at a place far more shocking and consequential. We discover that not only has the traditional distinction between illegal “street drugs” and legal “therapeutic prescription drugs” become so blurred as to be almost nonexistent, but between America’s twin drug epidemics – one illegal, the other legal – well over 70 million Americans are using mind-altering drugs. And that number doesn’t include abusers of alcohol, which adds an additional 60 million Americans. So we’re really talking about 130 million strung-out Americans. How is this possible?
Of course, most of the drug news we’ve heard lately has been about pot. It started with medical marijuana, with state after state successfully defying the federal ban. Then on Jan. 1, flat-out legalization took center stage, when Colorado and Washington opened their doors to exhilarated pot-smokers, while numerous other states – from Alaska, Oregon and California in the west to Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., in the east – announced plans to push for legalization in the coming months.
As a result, stock prices for cannabis companies soared (“The demand for marijuana is insatiable,” says one entrepreneur, “you have a feeding frenzy for the birth of a new industry”), the New York City-based publication “High Times” announced a new private-equity fund to “raise $100 million over the next two years to invest in cannabis-related businesses,” and ad agencies geared up to support “an industry estimated to already be generating revenues in the billions of dollars.”
The dramatic change in Americans’ attitude is reflected in a recent CNN poll headlined “Support for legal marijuana soaring.”
Somehow, in all the hoopla, it apparently doesn’t register that pot use lowers the IQ of young people. A massive, four-decade study published in 2012 by the National Academy of Sciences, titled “Persistent cannabis users show neuropsychological decline from childhood to midlife,” followed more than 1,000 subjects from birth until age 38! The researchers’ core finding? Repeated marijuana use by teenagers lowers their IQ – permanently.
Yet, according to a 2010 study by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, over 22 million Americans use illegal drugs,
Yet, according to a 2010 study by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, over 22 million Americans use illegal drugs, comprising marijuana/hashish, cocaine (including crack), heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants and prescription-type psychiatric and opioid drugs used without a prescription. And of those, fully half admit to driving on the public roadways under the influence of drugs!
Of course, when we think of driving “under the influence,” our minds turn to alcohol, so fasten your seatbelts: In 2010, nearly one-quarter of all Americans aged 12 and up participated in binge drinking, about 58.6 million people, and heavy drinking was reported for 16.9 million people. And an estimated 11.4 percent of persons 12 or older drove under the influence of alcohol at least once in the past year.
Bottom line, according to HHS: “In an average year 30 million Americans drive drunk [and] 10 million drive impaired by illicit drugs.”
‘Fastest growing drug problem’
So with more than 22 million Americans stupefied on illegal drugs and another 58 million with a serious drinking problem – that’s 80 million souls – and 40 million of them driving under the influence of intoxicants, the nation undeniably suffers from a massive “substance-abuse” problem.
But there is another parallel drug problem, the devastation of which is arguably just as severe and detrimental to American society as that involving illegal drugs and alcohol abuse – and some would say it’s actually worse.
And that is the astonishingly vast, and rapidly increasing, number of people taking medically prescribed but poorly understood, mind-altering psychiatric drugs. Indeed, today one in five adults – approximately 50 million Americans – take prescription psychiatric drugs.
Ironically, after marijuana (which is rapidly becoming legal), the most-abused drugs in America are prescription drugs, obtained and used “non-medically,” that is, without a prescription from a doctor.
As revealed in a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in one recent year “approximately 27,000 unintentional drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States, one death every 19 minutes.”
“Prescription drug abuse,” announced the CDC, “is the fastest growing drug problem in the United States.”
The skyrocketing rate of drug-overdose death rates “has been driven,” says the report, “by increased use of a class of prescription drugs called opioid analgesics” – drugs like hydrocodone (brand names Norco, Vicodin), hydromorphone (Dilaudid, Exalgo), oxycodone (OxyContin, Percocet) and morphine (Astramorph, Avinza).
“Opioid analgesics suppress your perception of pain,” explains WebMD, “and calm your emotional response to pain by reducing the number of pain signals sent by the nervous system and the brain’s reaction to those pain signals.”
For the last decade, “more overdose deaths have involved opioid analgesics than heroin and cocaine combined,” reports the CDC. In addition, “for every unintentional overdose death related to an opioid analgesic, nine persons are admitted for substance abuse treatment, 35 visit emergency departments, 161 report drug abuse or dependence, and 461 report nonmedical uses of opioid analgesics.” In other words, it’s an epidemic.
America’s traditional drug paradigm has long been something like this: On the one hand is the respectable, legal, medical world where enlightened doctors prescribe their patients wonder drugs that relieve their symptoms and make them feel more comfortable – OxyContin, anti-anxiety drugs (Valium, Xanax), sleeping pills, stimulants, mood stabilizers and, more recently, marijuana, hallucinogens and so forth.
On the other hand is the sleazy, criminal world of drug pushers who supply low-life users and addicts with drugs to satiate their habits, make them feel better and relieve their stresses, troubles and anxieties – drugs like OxyContin and other illegally obtained psych meds, marijuana, stimulants, cocaine, hallucinogens and so forth.
If the distinction between legal and illegal seems disturbingly indistinct and fluid – in some ways even unreal – keep reading, because it gets much more bizarre.
Creating ‘zombies’
A recent news story originating at The Fix, which features coverage on addiction and recovery, had this interesting headline:
“America’s Number One Prescription Sleep Aid Could Trigger ‘Zombies,’ Murder and Other Disturbing Behavior.”
The report includes true stories of murderers and other offenders who had taken the popular sleeping pill Ambien – classified as a “hypnotic” drug – and relates how their defense lawyers successfully argued that adverse drug effects from Ambien should be considered a mitigating factor. The drug reached national notoriety in 2006 when then-Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., had a bizarre nighttime car crash, telling police he was running late for a vote (which actually had occurred six hours earlier) and that, because he took Ambien, he had no recollection of the night’s events.
The current Ambien label reads as follows (see Page 20):
What is the most important information I should know about AMBIEN?
After taking AMBIEN, you may get up out of bed while not being fully awake and do an activity that you do not know you are doing. The next morning, you may not remember that you did anything during the night. You have a higher chance for doing these activities if you drink alcohol or take other medicines that make you sleepy with AMBIEN. Reported activities include:
driving a car (“sleep-driving”)
making and eating food
talking on the phone
having sex
sleep-walking
Let’s be clear: This is not fine print about “rare adverse events” (negative side effects that occur in less than one in 1,000 people taking a medication). These are instructions given to users of Ambien describing what they should expect.
So, drugging people into becoming sleepwalking, sleep-driving, sleep-eating, sleep-talking and sleep-sexing zombies with no memory of what they have done while in a hypnotic trance, this is a good thing? Really?
In case that went by too fast (or in the event you were on Ambien and slept through it), we are talking about “sleep-driving”! The frequency of motor vehicle accidents caused by people on Ambien is reportedly why the FDA is now recommending women take lower doses of such sleep aids, which were prescribed for Americans 60 million times in 2011.
continued
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/70-million-americans-taking-mind-altering-drugs/#1JlbQgJRr0bABf0K.99
