We look at a new study correlating craving sugar, depression and the tendency toward alcoholism in children; also this is the 2nd annual Children of Alcoholics Awareness Week.
Posts Tagged ‘alcohol’
Children of Alcoholics Week and sweets, depression & alcoholism
Friday, February 19th, 2010
Holiday Blues
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009The Holiday Season can be a wonderful time of thanksgiving, giving and sharing, enjoying food and festivities with family and friends. It can also be a very difficult time for someone coping with their addictions, and trying to maintain their recovery, especially with ever-present alcohol at parties and dinners, and the stress that family get-togethers can sometimes elicit, as well as issues with seasonal depression. Dr Inaba shares his thoughts.
Transcript:
CNS: Hi and welcome once again to the CNS addiction pod cast, I’m Howard LaMere here with Dr. Darryl Inaba. Darryl it’s the end of November and the holidays are upon us — this can be a wonderful time, a joyous time, getting together with family and friends. It can also present a lot of issues, especially those of us that have friends and family members involved in one way or another in substance abuse and addiction.
Darryl: Now I’ve always seen in my career I’ve been working in this field, that the holiday times, especially in the intense holiday times coming up in late November through the first of the year are real challenging, real difficult for not only people with substance abuse but also people with mental health issues as well. I’m not sure if there’s any real definitive statistics in studies that’s been done but it seems like we’ve had a lot more threatened suicides. We had a lot of people who were down-trod, who were very upset about what was going on in their lives and enough so to make suicide gestures and threaten suicide. Another time of year that’s difficult, believe it or not, is spring time. In spring time we actually have I think more suicides and less threatened suicide. So these are you know, like I said, spring time is the time of renewal, time of change, and if you’re going to change maybe that’s the time they do it. During the holiday season, people who aren’t in trouble with drugs or don’t have mental health issues they’re exuberant, they’re, they’re expressing joy and cheer and how everything’s wonderful and everything’s great and they just…
CNS: That can present a real contradiction there for someone…
Darryl: It, it really exaggerates to people struggling with their addiction or with depressions and mental health, how difficult their lives are and the contrasts and contradictions as such that it becomes overwhelming to many people. There are a number of people who are both depressed and have major drug problems to co-occurring disorder problems and especially in those individuals the holiday season can be a real challenging, difficult time of year. They’re going to see relatives, they’re going to be with friends, they’re struggling still with stigma of addiction. It’s a very difficult thing for them to take that first step where they can accept they have a biological problem. A problem with their brain that prevents them from controlling their use of drugs and alcohol, and for that reason they succumb to the stigma that continues to permeate our society that maybe they’re weak, or they’re bad or they’re stupid, they’re crazy, they’re amoral, they’re criminal, and this time of year if they’re struggling in their addiction and going through relapses, or even if they’re not going through relapses, just having “stinking thinking” about wanting to use again. All the good cheer and the happy times of the holidays, really conspires to reinforce how desperate they are and how difficult in with the difficult situations they are and so they develop what I call “the holiday blues” actually get very, very depressed this time of year and don’t know what to do. They don’t know if they should spend time with their relatives or friends. I often think there’s not enough fun in sobriety, we certainly have a lot of twelve-step groups and different activities where they’re clean and sober activities during holiday times to cheer people up and keep them from feeling too bad. But I don’t think there’s enough of that, I think there really needs to be much more alternative activities that addicts and alcoholics can participate in that are totally drug free and have no semblance of promoting the drug culture that’s more highly active during the holiday times, than it is the rest of the year. So that other problem is that, during this time of year with the families getting together, the parties at work, and the parties that all the normies are having, as you know the featured thing at the parties is always going to be alcohol and then for the more, food, and alcohol and you’ve got the pot and you’ve got all kinds of things going on so, the triggers, and the things that can cause a relapse and a slip in an addict are just huge this time of year and with that, the addict and people with depression run that risk of being involved with activities where everyone is happy and carousing but doing so under the influence that only triggers their craving and their “stinking thinking” and that might raise up in a slip which ultimately results in a relapse. So it’s a real tight rope that addicts have to walk this time of year and it is difficult for all of them.
CNS: So what then can the recovering person do to, to secure himself? That’s one question and the other question is, for the family members or their friends, what can they do to secure their selves and, and not create this awkward situation for the person in recovery?
Darryl: The first part of that question is, what can an addict do, right now the addict has to be more in touch with their addiction. They have to be more willing to participate in group activities and treatment and things like that where they can express and they can testify that they’re going through this depression, they’re going through the craving, they’re feeling sorry for themselves about all the differences and things they have caused through their addictions throughout the past year, resentments, they have to be able to process all that and the sad part about that is that most treatment programs, even the ones that I directed at the Haight Ashbury, you get so much pressure from your staff to close down and not have services and not have anything, especially on the eves like Christmas eve and New Years eve or nothing on Thanksgiving day and unfortunately those are the times when people need it the most and it’s just a wrestling job to try and keep services open and live and therefore you know recognize that staff have a need, they have a valid need to be able to take time off. But some how balancing that with the need to keep all services open so that addicts can address their issues and make use of what is available to help them refrain from going into a real funk about the holidays. Now what can their friends do, what can their families do, what can their significant others do? The big thing is, the awareness, that the more the community has to become aware that this is a difficult time for addicts. That addicts are not like them, that they get triggered and they go into craving from, sort of glorifying drug use and the things that are done at the parties and things like that and maybe make that sacrifice and I think that it’s imperative for the family of somebody who’s trying to remain in recovery, to make the sacrifice to not have any booze, not have any of those things at the party and to celebrate these activities in deference to that a family member has a serious life-endangering illness that they want to protect them with, because they’re normies so they don’t need to drink. If they do that I think they’ll be more helpful to the addict than they realize.
CNS: Now in that article that I handed you earlier from I think it was the Huffington Post, it talked about for the family members who may be have been abused by the addict emotionally, how they can, or might think about going about setting up boundaries and conditions for the family event. Now I’m wondering, I mean that’s a valid thing to do, but I’m wondering if that is going to trigger even more resentment in the person that’s grabbling with recovery issues?
Darryl: Well the family issues are huge and, and they haven’t…
CNS: The family of course, in and of itself, not withstanding drugs and alcohol, I mean there, there can be pressures there, you know… especially at the holiday times.
Darryl: Yeah, you don’t need to be in recovery to have family problems get to you, with your family and getting through old resentments and angers and all that stuff that happens with family. But, but family issues are just huge in dealing with addiction and the recovering addict and alcoholic and they aren’t addressed enough in programs. There’s not enough focus on a family components in the program where the family members learn about the disease, learn about the condition and disorder and learn what their family member is going through and then learn how to communicate differently, how to act differently, how to be different as a person enters into recovery. You’re going to have a changed person. He or she’s going to be totally changed and, in order to be healthy the family has to change. The addiction certainly results in some power other family members have, that this is how to identify the problem, he or she is always the root of all the evils that are happening to the family and that’s going to change and when that changes, it changes the dynamics of the family and how they interact together. There’s going to have to be a change on the addict themselves, to accept and recognize that often times the family members are furious at them. They’ve been run through the ringer with all the machinations that addiction occurs and trying to help this individual and then getting sabotaged and the person not following through and how he or she might have defamed the family or, or manipulated and you know really took advantage of people they loved the most, and so there’s going to be a huge bunch of that resentments and the fear and a valid one, that this is merely a respite, another manipulation and the persons going to show up for Thanksgiving and again steal something or do something drastic. So the family members have to work in a system with other recovering families like systems like AL-Anon, strong family programs and treatment to address all these issues and to set up boundaries and set up ways of interacting and re-interacting in new ways of interacting with each other and if it’s done correctly within the context of a treatment system, then I don’t believe it will be a trigger, an extra trigger for the addict. What it will be is an understanding that all of community being their immediate family, maybe even their friends or fellow employees, but there’s a community systems approach to helping them maintain recovery and changing their lives around. So if it’s done in that context, I think its great, if it’s done purely from an individual unilateral context that a mother, a parent or something is saying, well they’re not going to put up with this anymore and the person shows up and these are the rules without any kind of negotiation or explanation or any kind of, of process to develop it, then you’re right, and then it can become another trigger for that addict to say well you know, I’m never going to be any thing more in the eyes of my family I might as well use and get it over with.
CNS: Sounds like, sounds like we need psychologists at every dining room table everywhere but I don’t think that there’s enough to go around. But I think it is, it points out that the perception of addiction is changing albeit gradually and that’s a good thing that, that we’re beginning to be able to understand that this is more of a disease than a social weakness or a moral weakness.
Darryl: The wonderful thing is that when an addict really embraces recovery, embraces that they have a disorder, that they’re not really responsible for, but their treatment of it is totally their responsibility, and if they enter into that system and work the best that they can be at being healthy, the wonderful thing about this is not only does their health improve and their lives improve but usually the families’ lives improve, the significant others lives improve, the community, their neighbors, it affects everybody around them. As an addict, during their practice of their addiction affects everybody around them in a negative way and addict in recovery affects everybody around them in a real positive way, and everybody gets healthy. So that’s the wonderful thing about the treatment of addiction.
CNS: Well I’m sure more stories will evolve here in the next few weeks and I think we’ll get a chance to hear some of them. As ever any folks listening are more than welcome to drop us a comment or a question and if it is a question and we’ll try to address it in a future program, just stop by our website cnsproductions.com. Darryl thanks, happy holidays.
Alcohol-caffeine drinks & e-cigarettes
Friday, August 7th, 2009Our Addiction Radio podcast looks at the synergistic effects of combining alcohol with caffeine, as well as electronic or e-cigarettes, the attractiveness of both to younger audiences, and effects of marketing.
Transcript of podcast (click to listen):
CNS: Hi and welcome to the CNS addiction pod cast, I’m Howard LaMere, here with Dr Darryl Inaba, and Darryl there’s a bunch of interesting things in the news this week, and I don’t know, which you might want to comment on but just a quick list just for the benefit of people listening. Alcohol and caffeine drinks is being targeted by concerned people in the government as something as maybe needs some regulation, electronic cigarettes where also in the news being something that’s a largely made in China, and the health concerns around that and especially unknown additives and um, the continuation of the story about Michael Jackson and the propofol anesthetic. The abuse of that especially by the medical and medical profession itself as well as high profile folks that afford that can afford it. Maybe the one you’re looking at there a alcohol & caffeine drinks might be of something, might be something to chat about a bit.
Darryl: Howard actually those are all phenomenal developments and are interesting things to talk about. We’ve noticed this, this growth of caffeinated alcoholic beverages along time ago not just the fact that right now they’re coming out combined together where they’re mixing um, the vodka and the bourbon and the other things right along with the a soda and the fruit drinks in the, in the can that are sodas combined project, and of course that can supposedly only goes to adults twenty one years old.
The youth are the ones and under aged drinkers are the ones who are most attracted by these types’ drinks.
But prior to that there was, there is, still a huge growth in, what they call the bomb technique, out here, the bomb, there’s actually I think many of the bars now have specialized mini bars that, that target and focus on the combination of energy drinks with a shot of some sort of liqueur or some sort of liquid. The most popular one I’ve seen is Jägermeister.
Where one club here in the local area has a special bar that specializes with a red bull drinks. With red bull in a glass and then a shot of Jägermeister mixing that together foams up when it’s mixed together drinking that down, another club here has a rockstar. Rockstar is the one they like where they mix it with Rockstar and then another one has Monster, it depends on which popular energy drinks that people are interested in. But it’s a phenomenon that really goes back to the old concept of a speed ball where you mix both a drug of stimulatory brain activity with another drug of depressant activity in the brain and in all fairness the a, and when we looked at that in pharmacology as, what happens when you combine an upper and a downer usually the results were you get better effects than either of them alone. That the people who took or were exposed to morphine and cocaine or amphetamine and some sort of depressant drugs that, that was the best high they ever got was a combination
CNS: Yeah it doesn’t cancel each other out it doesn’t make you like normal.
Darryl: Yeah that’s the bigger myth or misunderstanding that they’re going to be an antidote for each other.
And so if you od on one you can be wakened up by the other or if you’re too over amped you can be put to sleep by the downer and they’re, they’re not true antagonist they don’t cancel out each other but what’s interesting is that they’re physic effects or the emotional effects that people get out of them when they’re combined seems to be almost additive or synergistic. Rather than canceling they actually augment each other. People really feel better when you, when you combine them so that’s one aspect about these energy drinks and caffeine being mixed with alcohol that you’re going to get a better effect, you know and people are going to get more euphoric and its going to be more habituating or more interesting or more addictive, to those people who are more inclined to addiction. The other thing that’s, that’s occurring is a dangerous pharmacology in which they work by effecting different parts of the brain and different brain chemistry. So what’s really happening when they take the combination of an upper and downer is they’re getting some parts of their brain that are being energized or being more stimulated or seemingly more alert while another part of their brain is being depressed or made sleepy so it’s sort of the equivalent of getting a wide awake, wide awake drunk, somebody who’s intoxicated, who’s reflexes are diminished, who’s perceptions are diminished and all that but emotionally they feel less sleepy or less drowsy and so that’s, that’s sets the stage for much more accidents, a lot more problems that they’ll get from, from a just drinking alone.
CNS: And probably the inclination to take more of it.
Darryl: Yeah because it’s euphoric, it’s, the combination gives you a better high too and then the inclination because it suppresses your inhibitions and things like that, you’re memory, you’re going, you’re going to use more drugs. So the person who’s a going to participate with the energy drinks with the alcohol or these new products that are combining caffeine with alcohol in a can is, is going to probably end up doing more then they norm, would normally do of either coffee or alcohol and in that way suffering a greater chance of, of problems from each of those drugs. But it is a phenomena that is really, really popular I see amongst very, very young drinkers, people who are twenty one and are just turned twenty one and are able to drink but more sadly I see it more common in the under age drinkers of people who aren’t legally able to drink but they’re getting into the drinking scene early and they seem to be really attracted to this combination speed ball of alcohol with caffeine
CNS: Yeah and probably part of, I think part of the concern here by the government by regulators is, that it is an attractive component?
Darryl: Attractive in terms of?
CNS: Yeah attractive to a younger audience and you know, I don’t know how regulation does much to that other than taking it off the market.
Darryl: It’s, it’s the same thing we looked at when we looked at nicotine, when nicotine needed to have a certain market share by increasing it’s, it’s sales by so much and they maxed out on the, the adult population, we believe we saw marketing that was focused or that was targeted to under age smokers, you know. Cartoonish types figures, Joe Camel scene was all about that, the whole allure was to a much younger population and I think the same thing is happening with these combination of buzz drinks or alcohol caffeine drinks, primarily because the whole energy drink scene is really a young scene, it’s started, it’s focused on, it’s marketed to, and if you look at the buyer, the profile of the average buyer of, of red bull or rockstar or monster they’re going to be a much, much younger population so you have that inherent population to begin with and inherent market and then when you add alcohol to that mix it just sort of exponentially adding your chances to a gain that market share.
CNS: I don’t know if its directly related but lets chat a little bit about the a electronic cigarette, it showed up on national public radio recently and what I didn’t know about it is that it’s apparently, primarily produced in China so there’s a lot of concerns about what might be in there and about, about the labeling. What do you think about the labeling, in general in both. I mean labeling is mentioned in, in this context in the energy and alcohol drinks because it I mean it says all over it that there’s alcohol in it but it doesn’t say how much caffeine there is in it and in the context of the electronic cigarettes it’s in a solution of Propylene Glycol which is not a terribly good thing to take into your body.
Darryl: Labeling certainly can play a major role in how market, in how product is marketed and how it’s viewed and when it became law that everything had to be, list it’s contents say food and people very quickly realized the marketing potential that that had and was able to promote products just by having their labeling or making sure they had a contents that were attractive to certain populations and track that population the same way you know labeling for a drugs like caffeine and nicotine has always played, I think, a major role and a very bizarre one, you would think when the government came out with each pack of nicotine had to be labeled that this is harmful to your health and everything that would be a deterrent, but it proved not to be a deterrent and in one case you had death brand cigarettes who decided to make that a positive and came out with a more appropriate warning that says, saying that this product will defiantly kill you. You know, it’s going to give you lung cancer, it’s going to mess with your heart and you’re going to die twenty two younger than the average non smoker and it certainly did not help it’s sales, it kind of boosted them because you have that kind of gangster element or the contrary element that I’m going to do this and that’s the case may be. But the whole move, this whole thing with electronic cigarettes and when I first heard about it I don’t know that much about I must admit, but when I first heard about I thought it was a form of trying to promote healthier nicotine you know, a form of, of trying to get rid of all the resins and all of the tars and all of the you know hundreds, hundreds of carcinogens and other nasty products that you get from smoking tobacco and so I thought I at least, I mean you know, at least now, the industry if it’s coming out of China, I don’t know who’s sponsoring it out of China or whatever but at least the industry is now willing to forego their old argument for hundreds of years that make claim and they actually testified before congress and had their doctors lined up and experts saying “In my opinion nicotine is not addictive”. At least now they’re foregoing this and saying hey, we’re not selling you the pleasure of, of the taste and the process of smoking, we’re selling you something you got, you’re strung out on, and we’re going to give it to you in a form that’s maybe a harm reduction form. You know we’re going to reduce the harm by giving it to you a purer form and one that’s going to be less carcinogenic although nicotine itself is carcinogenic; it’s going to be less so, without all those additives and the adulterants or whatever. So I thought that’s what was going to be and maybe it was a half way rational approach to satisfy the nicotine addicted population who weren’t going to stop smoking, using nicotine. But as it turns out what I understand of these a products that, that are these electronic cartridges that, that are filled with nicotine in the standardized form or in a gaseous form, is that they contain some of the other chemicals found in nicotine, they contain some of the other additives already there and as you mentioned there’s the potential that there could be other additives added to it. Now I imagine they have to come under FDA scrutiny in order to be sold as a product.
CNS: Apparently that’s part of why it’s in the news, apparently it’s not it, hasn’t been approved.
Darryl: Yeah, I don’t know how that works, how that, you’ve got these Indian cigarettes like Bidi and stuff like that its suppose to be made out of certain kinds of herbal, herbal plants and of a betel nut leaves and things like that that are sold for smoking but yet they aren’t, they don’t seem to come regulated so I’m not sure how our government decides what gets regulated and what doesn’t. But if they’re not regulated and if they maybe they slipped under the exemption for nicotine, nicotine early on its career gained a federal exemption that says that they don’t have to be banded. The way the government, the way our laws are, if, if a product is shown to cause cancer it’s, it’s no longer allowed for human consumption. Nicotine is the only substance I know that’s exempt from that condition because of the law being tobacco history from 1920’s and 30’s. Well maybe they’re, they’re slipping in under that, they’re saying this is nicotine and it’s, it’s allowed to be sold and they’re not saying what else is in there and what else going to be in there. But one thing that’s clear from the history nicotine in the United States, is that if you have a population, addicted populations, who are going to be attracted to a product and will be a loyal faithful population then you’re going to do everything you can to claim or keep that population using that substance. Plus you want to introduce other people so we saw all the manipulations of nicotine to make it more powerful, more addictive, at the same time they’re saying it’s not addictive. The creation of free base nicotine and who knows maybe the nicotine in these cartridges and these electronic nicotine, nicotine products is actually free base nicotine and not nicotine salts and therefore free base nicotine being much more addictive and toxic well you’re going to create a much greater degree of addiction so it, it is an interesting phenomena and probably one we need to look at but maybe if we look at it side ways or close enough it’s going to evoke a need to re-look at all of our nicotine laws and of course you know there was a recent partnership made between the tobacco industry and the government where by the FDA can now regulate the tobacco industry but, but they cant ban it that was the deal that was struck so this, this will be an interesting legal political phenomena that’s pushed up to our fore front to see where this takes us.
CNS: And as all of these topics, I’m sure we’ll get to talk about it multiple times in the future.
You’ve been listening to the CNS pod cast for this week and if you have any questions or comments we’d love to hear them. Send them along in an email and Dr Inaba will try to respond to them as possible in future broadcasts or pod casts and you can do that by visiting our web site and sending us an email from there and that website is cnsproductions.com. Darryl, thank you once again and talk to you soon.
Thanks for visiting the CNS pod cast. Please check back soon for the next in the series and visit our website www.cnsproductions.com.
Michael Jackson & the rise of prescription drugs abuse
Thursday, July 30th, 2009Dr. Inaba talks about celebrities like Michael Jackson, and others who have died because of overuse and abuse of prescription drugs and alcohol … and the increasing international epidemic of prescription drug abuse.
Transcript of podcast (click to listen):
CNS: Looking under addiction and substance abuse today, and a lot of talk about Michael Jackson and a Purple Fall. Do you know much, much about that? Diprivan is the trade name, I guess.
Darryl: I think we’re looking at, lets start with your 2009 and the number of celebrities who have died to prescription drugs or overdose of prescription drugs, is pretty dramatic, but I don’t know if it’s more… greater or any less than, than previous years a, because this always seems to be an affliction of people in stardom, people in news – Keith Ledger, on top of his career like right in filming the end of batman OD’s on prescription drugs and dies. And it’s not so much the specific drug that’s involved, but the fact that there in every case a poly-drug situation that these celebrities are placed on just a huge array of different psychoactive drugs. The majority of them being some sort of depressant, something that’s going to make you sleepy, drowsy or numb your senses to pain or cause an anesthetic effect and that, that’s what usually kills people, is that people go into respiratory arrest or some sort of cardiac problem that then leads to just a whole collapse of the body and they die. I think I was more shocked to find out recently that a President John F Kennedy was on a whole huge cocktail of different drugs before he was assassinated so that, that really causes one to think what is it about being in the news or being a celebrity that first causes the need for human beings to alter their states of conscientiousness and so many ways to deal with it and what is it about celebrities that prescribers primarily their immediate primary care doctors are so willing to place them on such heavy and, and a variety of medications that you never see them do on somebody who’s not a celebrity.
CNS: Right. So what is that all about and why is it happening?
Darryl: Michael Jackson was not on just that one drug, he was on a variety of drugs and the combination of these drugs are usually at a minimum addictive, meaning they work together to increase the sedating effects of each other in proportion to their individual effects are but lots of time, or most of the time when there’s usually a death involved the persons who are taking super addictive or super or drugs that potentiate each other so when you add one on one the answer is six or eight or ten; its just much greater than what you would expect.
CNS: Right and of course alcohol is always, being that potent poison that it is, the body always tries to grapple with that and then, you put these other things on top and, like you say it multiplies.
Darryl: Well, that’s the amazing thing Howard, because a lot of these medications were, were started to be developed were less toxic you know especially with celebrities dying, Marilyn Monroe and things like that they, prescribers came under heavy scrutiny as, as I’m sure this one will with Michael Jackson.
So what were they doing, what were they thinking, why were they giving them these types of medication, so there was this whole development of this family of drugs called benzodiazepines: valium, librium, quanopin, xanax, ativan, tranxene, halcyon, resterol and maybe couple dozen more that’s in clinical practice today and, the reason that they were promoted and they were used so widely at first is because they had what’s called a huge therapeutic index. When you take the lethal dose and you put that in a ratio or as a mathematical divider so you divide the lethal dose by its therapeutic dose. So usually if you get a huge number from that division that means that the drug is really, really safe. It means that, if a one milligrams give you the effects of drowsiness and 10 milligrams is the amount that’s going to kill you, then it’s therapeutic index is 10 and that’s a relative measure of the safety of the drug.
Strychnine for instance, the therapeutic index of strychnine is a one, meaning that’s why its used as a rat poison. The amount of strychnine it takes to make you feel like cocaine or stimulated high is exactly that amount that will kill you. So, it’s not to same with all drugs, but, when valium was tested and it was released it was immediately prescribed a lot because its therapeutic index was like 770 meaning you had to take 770 times a 5 or 10 milligram dose that makes you feel sedated to kill you. So was tremendously safe but nobody looked at what you’re saying what, what happens if alcohol enters the equation or if Vicodin enters the equation or if Darvon enters the equation or any other barbiturate or other sedative drug. Well as it turned out although it’s safe if you only took Valium, if you combine them with alcohol it totally smashed up that therapeutic index so a much smaller amount could kill you and if that’s a lot of the problem we are seeing also with these celebrities and their drugs.
CNS: And of course it’s not just celebrities too; another thing in the news here today is prescription drug abuse rising at an alarming rate in the U.S. and I read the same story in Canada yesterday.
Darryl: I’ve done several papers on that because the fact is this, this has been happening for about ten years and not just in the United States and Canada it’s, it’s a world wide phenomena its just that it’s a massive turn to abusing prescription drugs. Right now I think the reports out of Washington is that prescription drug abuse represents 40% of all of our drug problems in our United States. It’s represents 80% of our emergency room admissions, 30% of our emergency room deaths, so prescription drug abuse is the thing that … you know what’s interesting … you look at the use surveys, you look at the modern trend of the future and what the young people views as the predictor of where we are going and right now the abuse of prescription drugs like Vicodin, Oxycontin, are much greater in youth than abuse in of methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, they’re, they’re actually when you combine all the different prescription drugs they’re, they’re really approaching a marijuana, and knocking marijuana as the most abused illicit drug of you know of youth in America. So this thing is happening and the question is, what comes about is why you know is, is prescription Vicodin any better than illicit heroin or opium or anything like that? Is prescription Adderall or Concerta or Ritalin any better than street methamphetamine or cocaine, well, why would, I don’t think they are.
CNS: Well is the perception that a because they’re a, they come essentially from a doctor and a pharmaceutical company that makes them more safe and more legitimate?
Darryl: I think that’s it and I think that in a back-handed or roundabout way its sort of an indicator that prevention finally is being successful in this country because for the last 30, maybe a hundred years, but certainly within the last 20-30 years there’s been a real focus of prevention of highlighting the consequences and the dangers of illicit drugs, that the adulteration and the misrepresentation and the gaffling, the rip-offs and everything you get and then you got a MRSA (staph) from some drugs and you’ve got a flesh-eating bacteria from some other drugs – that because they are tracked on the street, has raised the awareness, I think, of everybody – that street drugs are non-reliable, unsafe and much more dangerous whereas if you’ve got a prescription drug at least there’s some degree of certainty that its been monitored and has the right dosage form and its got at least the ingredient that they claim it has to have that doesn’t take into account to tell you the truth the, the evolving drug problem that nobody seems to be monitoring yet, that maybe we might start looking at first and that’s counterfeiting – that manufacturers that are able to stamp out any drug that looks just like any prescription drugs so they are going to end up with the same thing.
CNS: And that’s part of what we see in the phenomena of the availability of prescription drugs on the internet, coming either from legitimate sources being resold or coming from over seas where they might well be counterfeit.
Darryl: And when they’re counterfeit there’s no guarantee that they have to contain anything, I mean with Quaalude was a big thing, when Quaalude was a big a popular drug and then banded made it a controlled substance and so on and no longer manufactured in the United States next thing you know you saw counterfeit 11-7-14 and borgs and all the different methods and makes of Quaaludes that looked just like the original tablet but in fact were totally counterfeit and contained things like benadryl, pcp and a whole bunch of other drugs, so it’s a phenomenon that I guess the understanding of the dangers of counterfeit drugs have not been portrayed as well as the dangers of illicit to regular street drugs and its going to take a while for the general public to realize that maybe these things aren’t as, prescription drugs aren’t any safer than a street drugs but right now whether it’s a safety factor, maybe its availability I don’t know maybe there’s just a lot of it around like you said on the internet, states like Oregon who places within the top five of all categories of abuse of prescription drugs and the young, who’s in the top four and adults, and the type of drugs and things like that. One can’t help but think part of reason might be this state has a compassionate position on treatment of pain. This state’s wants practioners and providers to err on the side of over treating pain instead of under-treating pain rather than trying to seek a good balance and what that leads to is manipulation, doctor shopping all kinds of ways that people can get prescription drugs in seemingly legitimate ways but inappropriately to take much more to take themselves or to sell.
CNS: And then mixing them themselves, if you have multiple doctors you don’t necessarily know what the, what the counter, what the, the, the co-occurring phenomena are.
Darryl: Right, Oregon actually has moved in that direction. The legislature just passed in this state a high risk drug monitoring system so any drug that has a high profile to be diverted and abused, say soma, vicodin, oxycontin is going to be a national, I mean a state wide data back, data bank where pharmacists can look into doctors, can look into and try and weed out people who shows up the same week at ten doctors offices getting prescriptions for vicodin for the same leg pain or something like that.
CNS: And maybe even more scary, what we are finding especially, maybe with the younger people is simply going into their parents or their friends’ parents or their friends’ bathroom and just kind of picking and choosing pills just based on the name and the color or whatever.
Darryl: You know I, this, this is so amazing I grew up in an area where your parents said, Well we are go to, you know, the Smith’s house down the street they invited our family over for dinner, and you go, oh no I got a sore throat, I got a heart pain, you know, I got a headache, we’d everything in the world to avoid that kind of boring situation. But now days its the opposite, kids cant wait to be invited with their parents to go out to dinner at their friends parents friends home because they, they call it farming, or grazing, there’s a bunch of names that the kids have for it you immediately go to the bathroom open the medicine cabinet, go through what ever they’ve got and some of these kids actually grab pills when they don’t know what they are and take them anyway. To discover they take a birth control or something like that so it is a very, very dangerous practice but farming parties also include kids grabbing what ever they can, and getting together with other kids and then exchanging or sharing those prescription drugs so we, we’re in an era, you know, we should be concerned about meth and meth is still a problem in Oregon and we should be concerned about the rise of cocaine, the rise of heroin right now, it’s happening but by in large the biggest drug problems we have and, and the largest growth of our problems we have of this state and other states is prescription drug abuse.
CNS: And not likely to end soon, this story will continue I’m sure. Thanks Darryl
Darryl: Sure.
That wraps our pod for today. Thanks for visiting the CNS pod cast. Please check back soon for the next in the series and visit our website www.cnsproductions.com
# # #
Get the required QUICKTIME Plugin
