Posted on 05/08/2011 12:34:35 PM PDT by Cardhu
In the United States the number of people hospitalised for prescription drug abuse has increased four hundred percent in the past ten years.
The small town of Portsmouth, Ohio is the epicentre of the problem.
Over thirty people - many in their early twenties - have died from prescription drug abuse.
One in ten babies born in Scioto County (Sy-oh-toe) last year tested positive for drugs.
Fatal overdoses have surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of accidental death in Ohio.
I met Andrea Queen, a reformed abuser at her new place of work in Portsmouth a clinic helping today's abusers.
A friend told Andrea to take a prescription pill one evening - "just to get the party going," he said. It led to a habit that nearly killed her. She told me:
"This growing sense of paranoia helped convince me that I needed to take myself out of this world that killing myself would be the one way out."
Ed Hughes is the Executive Director of The Counseling Center Inc and has been charting the rise of prescription drug abuse in Ohio. He shows me a series of maps showing the counties in the State ... each one he hands me gets progressively redder in colour.
"We had high admissions for opiate addictions in 2001 and then when we look eight years later in 2009."
Street clinics known as Pill Mills dole out the highly addictive opiate Oxycotton (OxyContin is the official name) to anyone with the money to pay for it some doctors in the area are cashing in on this big business. Ed told me:Scioto County is an area once known for steel and shoe making but which now has one of the highest rates of prescription drug abuse in the state of Ohio...and the country
."Most of the time they're doctors that have become marginalised in their profession they're, you know, they've had problems with their practice or problems with their hospitals ...more than one of the Pill Mills here in our community are owned and operated by people who have had past felony drug offences."
Andrea's recovering from the prescription drug hell that almost ended her life and now counsels others .. with a warning: "Don't do it doesn't get the party going it gets the addiction going."
Not everybody recovers from prescription drug abuse and a wall in the display window of an empty department store in Portsmouth is testimony to that.
It contains the names of thirty six people who have died in this area as a result of abusing prescription drugs.
Joanna Krohns knows this all too well. She lost her son Wes when he accidentally shot himself while high on painkillers. She's now started a group called Solace to help other grieving parents.
"When you lose a child it's such a devastating thing I didn't really know where to turn, who to turn talk to and I thought if I can just reach out to other parents give them somebody to talk to give them hope so that's kind of what I did."
The wall in downtown Portsmouth containing so many young faces - the majority were around the age of twenty two - is heartbreaking to look at.
Easy access to painkillers right across America means many more are likely to lose their lives too.
AlJazeera is only for the movers and shakers in Washington and the rest of the world.
Do not watch it! :)
AlJazeera is only for the movers and shakers in Washington and the rest of the world.
Do not watch it! :)
I just saw this first hand a few weeks ago. My ex, whom I lived with for ten years and still talk to, was always a bit depressed. A forty hour a week job was typical and she was functional. She started going to a doctor for it a few years ago. She gave her a prescription. Then that didn’t work anymore so she got anouther one. then this prescription was interacting with anouther one so she needed anouther one. Long story short she is on disability (too messed up to do anything but collect drugs and money from the govt.) and has 13 prescriptions she takes daily.
When she has a bad spell it is never because she is a junkie, she just needs to get her meds adjusted which invariably means she needs more. I told her just because her drug dealer has a PhD, doesn’t mean she isn’t a junkie. Sad story.
As for lacking in charm, I like the people in Portsmouth, Gallopolis, Belpre, Marietta and on and on just fine. Sure, the ratio of dregs to good folks is higher than in the past. But there's also still plenty of decent, honest people. I have great respect for those that uphold their Appalachian roots. There's still folks down there that do that down there.
I live near here and while there is Scioto County (Sy-oh-toe), there’s also Newark (Nerk).
When I mentioned “charm,” I didn’t mean the people (I apologize for that.) I meant Southern Ohio doesn’t have the same feel as WVA or Kentucky. Yes, they all look alike to a point, but in Ohio it just seems so much more depressing.
I misspoke a bit on that procedure. I asked my wife about it again and apparently she wore some kind of device which received the images wirelessly from the camera. The images were downloaded off that and the camera was just passed in the stool and sent to the sewage treatment plant, having served its purpose!
they come into the ER...describe vague pain that will take blood tests and radiology tests to explain and when they are all normal , the person gets pain meds prescribed OR they get admitted and put on a Dilaudid pain machine.....because drs and hospitals MUST try to relieve pain...its a "patient right" issue...
funny how all these adicts are allergic to Darvon,Ultram,NSAIDS,etc...funny how they HAVE to have dilaudid....they even know how high you should set the machine and God help you if you don't set it high enough...
sometimes these addicts will simply get Dilaudid IV shots every 3-4 hrs...but they also will ask for Phenegan injections AND benadryl at the same time....no high too good for our addicts...
you wouldn't believe how many youngish patients are on huge doses of oxy....for their "back" pain etc...
yeah. They buy it on the street.
I had a patient die of a MSContin overdose...she stole them from her cousin (also a patient of mine) who had metastatic cancer.
Then there was the lost pain pills for one of our chronic pain patients. After the second time she “lost” them, we put on a patch, and her daughter came into the ER withdrawing. That was before the druggies learned to soak the patch and inject the medicine.
Then there was a 13 year old girl (not my patient) who was told at a party “drink this and get high”. She did, and died. Where did the morphine syrup come from ? The other teen got it from the medicine cabinet after her grandmother died of cancer.
So do they get these from pill mills, or from ordinary docs? Or do they steal them?
The end result will be more people suffering more pain...
I agree that there is a depressed feeling. Really on both sides of the river. The northeasterners exploited the natural resources. Now the region is trying to figure out what it is again.
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