I have often thought one of the larger epidemics this country may face in the coming years is that of prescription drug abuse. Granted it is a serious problem now, but I've always had an inkling that it would get worse over time.
Today I received one of my annual drug store magazines and was flipping through it when something caught my eye. Normally they print in these magazines the overall usage of drugs nationwide. This one had a comparison of usage for top drugs over the past five years, and what I saw kind of blew my mind.
In 2003 there were 89.6 million prescriptions written for Hydrocodone/APAP. In 2007, just five years later, that jumped up to 119.1 million prescriptions. That is a 33% increase in volume over just five years time.
Mean while drugs such as Levothyoxine, Atenolol, Furosemide, Liptor (classic maintenance drugs) all remained relatively the same. The only other increase of this proportion was with Amoxicillin which rose from 38.7 million to 53.2 million in the same amount of time. That is a 37% increase!
Now you cannot tell me that in five years more people are getting hurt and more people are needing antibiotics. It is well known that many doctors will give patients an antibiotic just to 'shut them up' even when they don't need one. That is yet another problem for another blog post.
The part that really gets me though is why the Hydrocodone dispension numbers have gone up so much in the last five years. One would assume we would be regulating a controlled drug like that more and ensuring that such an explosion in usage would not occur. It's funny because I've always thought that we were using more and more of this, but I wasn't quite sure. Usually I chalked it up to me just not noticing it in my early years. Obviously this is not the case.
You have to wonder if, or when, this prescription drug issue is going to spiral out of control. Its only been in the last few years that the FDA has seemingly gotten their act together in several areas, and perhaps this is the next area to clean up for them. Until then, I guess I'll keep dispensing our hydrocodone as if its Pez...
1 comment:
hey i am an addict who is recovering, i read taps blog and comment there. i linked to yours and figured id give it a try at 1am since im bored.
rx abuse is rampid and very very huge and growing in the usa. in fact rx abuse has now climbed over meth abuse. and thats like woah. meth is still an epidemic but for rx abuse to beat it is unheard of. its sad too. i live in an area thats ran sacked by rx abuse, in fact heroin has moved in to replace the rx opiates due to their expense and heroin being more potent, easy to inject and lasts longer than oxy. anyhow. i want to say i bookmaked your blog and will read it more. are you a pharmacist ? there is a good radio show on sun nite www.prescriptionaddictionradio.com write back if you wanna you have my email in this open id.
thx
Post a Comment