If Prescription Drugs Are Terribly Abused by Teens, Why Isn’t Anyone Doing Anything About It?

Question by Kaden: If prescription drugs are terribly abused by teens, why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?
Prescription drugs are abused all the time and most pills out there are dangerous and can cause health issues in the future even if it’s not abused.
It seems like there is a pill for everything yet no one acknowledges that most pills out there are bad for you and can cause harm in the future, why?

Best answer:

Answer by Tink
No one is getting high off blood pressure, bone density, gout, menopause, etc, etc, medication.

The vast majority of medications are not abused to get high…however, the ones that are….I’m with you. I would like to know how it is the girls I work with who are in rehab can buy a hundred vicodin at a time, or how percocets can be had on any corner in my town….I can’t believe it comes from doctors over prescribing them….there has to be a leak somewhere.

But this is not a simple issue – there are ten questions for every answer we have, and the answers are nebulous…

For example, why do kids want to get all messed up on these things? It can’t be just because they want to have fun – because who would put a loaded gun to their head to have fun?

Why is is that we have so many people taking opiate pain medications, that kids have them in most medicine cabinets? I have a hard time believing people neeed a script for 50 vicodin to have a wisdom tooth removed.

What holes are there in the supply line that allow so many of these things to get onto the street.

If OTC cough syrup doesnt control cough (which a number of studies suggest) but kids can get high off it, why is it available?

Why isn’t the DEA going after the Mexican and Indian pharmaceutical companies that supply most meth makers in the US (most meth cookers aren’t going to unload a pharmacy shelf worth of pills to make a single dose) taking pseduephadrine off the shelfs has done little to reduce meth abuse…

Ugh! I have a bunch of questions, all in rant format, and for that I’m sorry.

I share your furstration, but know that there are many good medications out there that do not have the potential for abuse, that improve lives everyday.

Answer by Theresa
Three reasons:

1. Money! So simple and so insidious.

2. Drugs as emotional quick fixes.

3. Lack of ease with our emotions.

And I don’t have any easy answers or solutions to any of them.

More on 1.:

Prescription drugs are big business. So many people want to believe that the pharmaceutical industry is benevolent and honest. It’s an industry like any other, and the businesses have profit as their primary goal, just like any other. It is so naive to quote the proximity to the medical world and claim that there are higher standards. There SHOULD be, but there aren’t.

And claiming that the legislation and regulations ENSURE there are higher standards is also rubbish.

Unfortunately, the real issue is the glorification of money as a symbol of power and success, and money as a false idol has been bought lock stock and barrel by our western society, and the developing nations are following our lead. When did we forget that money is ONLY a medium of exchange, and not the end in itself?

Back to something like a helpful answer to your question … while the money problem needs addressing, we have to address our own vulnerability to these drugs in the first place.

More on 2.:

The underlying problem with abuse of drugs of any sort by any age group lies with the reason we feel a need to smother our emotional upsets, and feel better … even at the expense of our physical health.

Put more simply, many drugs (legal/illegal, prescribed or freely available) have the effect of temporarily changing the way we feel. So, if we feel like crap, and having a couple of drinks every day when we come home makes us feel better for a few hours, then guess what many of us do.

So, it’s a quick fix that if continued ensures we never deal with whatever the real problem is – the reason we feel crappy. If it’s simply a bad day at work, that a nice evening and a good sleep helps us get over, then it’s not a big deal. But many people are experiencing strong emotional issues that, pushed down over and over again, get worse and require more and more or stronger and stronger “treatment” to keep them at bay.

More on 3.:

Much of western society sees emotions as embarassing or examples of a lack of maturity or sophistication. We glorify the analytical left brain giving it the status of mature adult, and heap shame on the emotional right brain claiming it as the immature child.

Our emotions, however, are very important messages and signposts – all of them. So, if we are getting very hurt by something that is occurring in our lives, but smother that emotion and pretend it’s not there, then how can we make any changes to find the source of that hurt and address it somehow?

Addressing the emotional issue requires support from others and some tools to do so. Both of these are often missing. So it ends up being a Catch 22 situation.

To your specific question … teenagers are learning from the society around them, and we are telling them to medicate rather than investigate. And via the availability of prescription drugs, we’re giving them another simple means to do medicate, and little of the support and tools to investigate.

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