Alcohol & Drug Addiction Treatment

At the rate we’re going in America, drug rehab programs will never go out of business. If it seems to you that we have at all put a dent in the illicit drug problem then your hopes will be dampened by the fact that prescription drug abuse has now reared its ugly head as an even bigger issue.

Back in the day, you perhaps noticed all your Grandmother’s medications would go missing when you brought certain friends over. Nowadays, doctors irresponsibly misdiagnose young children and adults and prescribe highly addictive medications which patients become dependent on. And of course there’s the crafty criminal and drug addict who knows how to abuse the system; he knows what to say to be diagnosed as “bi-polar,” so he can get some pills to take and to sell to his friends. In schools and on the streets, youth are confronted with both illicit and prescription drugs. Both highly addictive and both potentially deadly.

It is time for a nation-wide prevention campaign. While I whole-heartedly support effective treatment solutions (and have been blessed to have found the right program for both my husband and my brother), it is time for a national prevention campaign. If the American government wants to wage a REAL war on drugs, we need to start young by giving kids the truth about drugs.

Current prevention campaigns in schools are teaching children that drug abuse is inevitable along with “safe” methods to use drugs. This apathetic approach to educating children simply agrees with society’s moral decline and does nothing to PREVENT further drug abuse. A recent prevention campaign study showed that children, when given the truth about drugs, decided not to use drugs and stayed off drugs up to two years after being indoctrinated.

Today’s children are tomorrow’s civilization. It’s time we look at what kind of world we are leaving behind.

Official statements released after Heath Ledger’s death gave unequivocal confirmation that he died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine. In layman’s terms, Heath was on too many prescription drugs all at once. Further reports indicated that medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies denounced any responsibility for Heath’s tragic and untimely death, as the combination of medications Heath was on was one that “no doctor would ever prescribe.” So let us assume then that these medications were obtained illegally and they were not prescribed. Some unscrupulous doctor sold the drugs somewhere and they ended up on the streets. The drugs were abused and resulted in the death of a loving father.

This is a nation wide problem, especially for residential drug rehabs. This does not only happen in Hollywood. This happens every day in regular American lives. In King County, Washington (Seattle), prescription opiates killed 148 people in 2006, a 572 percent increase since 1997. In Virginia, prescription narcotics took 399 lives in 2006, compared with 146 deaths from cocaine and amphetamines. In Oklahoma, of 603 drug-related deaths in 2006, more than half, 327, were attributed to hydrocodone, methadone or oxycodone. In Florida, people who died of drug overdoses in 2007 had prescription drugs in their systems more often than illicit drugs.

How many more celebrities must have their tragic story plastered across tabloid magazines? How many more parents must lose their children, and how many more children must lose their parents? Prescription drugs are highly addictive and can be deadly. Yet they are prescribed to the masses to cover up symptoms which are a direct result of nutritional deficiencies or sleep deprivation.

If pharmaceutical companies won’t take responsibility and neither will doctors, who will?