We in the recovery community are digesting with difficulty the stunning news that 180 million prescriptions for anti-depressants were written in the US last year.
My math has never been the best, but that equates to roughly one out of every two Americans seeking solace in little purple, yellow, green or whatever colored pills. Am I the only one left who thinks occasional bouts of lifestyle depression are not only a necessary part of the human experience -- how could we be happy without them or for that matter, learn basic psychic coping skills -- but an affirmation of our innate humanity?
It seems that the powers that be -- big pharma and the increasingly lazy practitioner community have opted for the easy way out. Its a lot easier to psychically castrate folks than let them have and resolve their feelings.
It has become evident that dollars spent on youth prevention are totally wasted. There has been absolutely no measurable impact from the billions of dollars that have been spent on youth prevention programs on national drug use. The quote below excerpted from Professor Mike Male's excellent Op Ed piece in the New York Times on Jan 3rd illustrates an alarming but hardly surprising trend in American drug abuse.
"According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of Americans dying from the abuse of illegal drugs has leaped by 400 percent in the last two decades, reaching a record 28,000 in 2004. The F.B.I. reported that drug arrests reached an all-time high of 1.8 million in 2005. The Drug Abuse Warning Network, a federal agency that compiles statistics on hospital emergency cases caused by illicit drug abuse, says that number rose to 940,000 in 2004 — a huge increase over the last quarter century."
Why are so few Americans aware of these troubling trends? One reason is that today’s drug abusers are simply the “wrong” group. As David Musto, a psychiatry professor at Yale and historian of drug abuse points out, the war on drugs has traditionally depended on “linkage between a drug and a feared or rejected group within society.” Today, however, the fastest-growing population of drug abusers is white, middle-aged Americans. This is a powerful mainstream constituency, and unlike with teenagers or urban minorities, it is hard for the government or the news media to present these drug users as a grave threat to the nation.
Among Americans in their 40s and 50s, deaths from illicit-drug overdoses have risen by 800 percent since 1980, including 300 percent in the last decade. In 2004, American hospital emergency rooms treated 400,000 patients between the ages 35 and 64 for abusing heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, hallucinogens and “club drugs” like ecstasy.
Its time to stop trying to prevent the inevitable and treat the preventable.
SoberBulldog guest blogger, Rick Ohrstrom, has a personal knowledge of the disease of alcoholism and addiction and has been involved in the addictions treatment area in both professional and advocacy roles for the past 15 years. He is the chairman of the board for C4 Recovery Solutions and has an extensive history in business enterprises.
