It's a Rush Limbaugh Country: Americans consume 80 percent of the world's pain pills [View all]

[stockholmer]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17963222

Rich Elassar is a victim of the fastest growing drug addiction in the US. The 36-year-old from New Jersey began taking the painkiller Percocet to get high at weekends. Within months, his addiction spiralled out of control and he turned to crime to finance his habit.

Mr Elassar served three years in jail robbing a bank and lost his business and his wife as a result. Outside of prison he has struggled to stay clean, relapsing four times. Now he is under the care of a physician and taking medication to curb his addiction. He has been clean for more than a year.

Americans consume 80% of opiate painkillers produced in the world, according to congressional testimony by the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians. And addicts are not the only ones impacted by the crisis. Howard Levine runs a pharmacy on Long Island that was twice robbed by an addict desperate for painkillers. He no longer provides most prescription painkillers.

Unlike drugs like heroin or cocaine, painkiller drugs are legal. Many are now asking whether over-prescription by doctors is making the epidemic worse.

Video at link above

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2142481/Americans-consume-80-percent-worlds-pain-pills-prescription-drug-abuse-epidemic-explodes.html

Americans consume 80 percent of the world's supply of painkillers -- more than 110 tons of pure, addictive opiates every year -- as the country's prescription drug abuse epidemic explodes.
That's enough drugs to give every single American 64 Percocets or Vicodin. And pain pill prescriptions continue to surge, up 600 percent in ten year, thanks to doctors who are more and more willing to hand out drugs to patients who are suffering.

As more people get their hands on these potentially-dangerous drugs, more are taking them to get high. Their drug abuse leads to 14,800 deaths a year -- more than from heroin and cocaine combined.

'We've become a society of wusses,' Long Island, New York, pharmacist Howard Levine told the BBC. Mr Levine stopped carrying all of the major addictive prescription drugs after he was robbed twice by addicts looking to get high.

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