Abuse of prescription drugs is most common among those who enjoyed the most advantages in adolescence, causing some to rethink the consequences of privilege.
The Atlantic
By sophomore year Evan was sleeping on a blowup mattress in an empty house off campus. He had no bed. No furniture. No posters or mini-fridge or shelf fraught with textbooks. He had no friends. He had sold the former, severed ties with latter, and now spent his hours curled up on an Aerobed until his dealer came through.
This is where the police found him. They wanted to know why he had purchased 43 calculus books when there wasn't a single calculus class on his course load. He had been buying them on his parent's credit card and selling them back for cash. When his parents called after having words with the police, his feebleness dislodged the truth:
"I've been an Oxycontin addict for the past two years, and I need help."
* * *
Prescription drug abuse is now recognized as a page in our catalogue of national issues. The stories of its victims elicit both sympathy and rage. Fingers are pointed all over, but only recently has the government has begun to act. The FDA is pushing for stricter regulations. Industry literature is being reevaluated. "Take-Back" initiatives designed to dispose of unused drugs are being implemented in many states, and prescription drug monitoring programs are already being used in most.
Pills allow young adults to continue their lifestyles of overdependence and reliance even once they leave the crust-less sandwich comfort of their homes.
These tactics, however, almost exclusively deal with the supply side of the problem. As we've seen with marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms, and several Schedule I drugs sprinkled like pixie dust over many an adolescent memory -- regardless of how fortified the supply becomes with federal red tape, demand almost always comes out victorious.
The question is, why is there a hot demand for prescription drugs to begin with? And who, exactly, is doing the demanding?
This would have been fairly easy to answer some years ago when the opioid abuse so regnant in low-income, rural communities (pigeonholed as "hillbilly heroin") was the role prescription drug addiction seemed to be playing on the national stage. Painkillers promise a quick metaphysical escape for those living in insufferable states of poverty. They also provide a lucrative business with a street price tag of a dollar per milligram. But what of the most recent demographic to come to the forefront of disheartening statistical surveys? What of white, affluent, youth -- a social group which, historically, has it better than anyone else?
Kids born between the years 1984 and 1990 abuse painkillers (the cause of three of every four overdoses) 40 percent more than any other age group or time before them. A study published in Health Affairs on Wednesday suggests that the increase in fatal drug overdoses among youth has grown so severe that it is a "major contributor" in the gap between life expectancy in the U.S. and other high-income countries. In 2011 alone, close to 1.7 million people between the ages of 12 and 25 (over 4,500 young people per day) abused a prescription drug for the first time; three-fourths of them were white. According to a 2009 survey, 88 percent of those admitted to treatment for the abuse of opioid-based medication, and 66 percent of those admitted for stimulants, were also white. Those who abuse prescription drugs in college are more likely to be white, as well as male, have a mother with a bachelor's degree or more, and perform poorly academically.
***
Evan was all of the above.
"I remember sitting by a fire in the eleventh grade and taking the medication and thinking to myself that if I had this every day in infinite amounts for the rest of my life I would use it all," he said. "I would take it every day, and I wouldn't have any problems. My life would be fine."
Evan had just gotten his wisdom teeth removed. He had been prescribed twenty 7.5 hydrocodone's and had taken his first two. He was sitting beside the fireplace in his four-story house with a central staircase that spiraled up. He admired his parents, and they were thoroughly devoted to him. He attended a prestigious private school and had the camaraderie of a pack of plucky friends. To an outsider, he would appear to have no real "problems" apart from the bloody pits in his gums. But as he approached college, Evan had become increasingly distressed.
continues:
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...ain-of-being-young-white-and-affluent/273471/
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