This article is relevant to you if you take prescription drugs, not only if you abuse them.
This article is also relevant to anybody fighting addiction or knows someone that is.
If you are just simply curious about drugs in America, you might want to read this.
If you only got time to read one section, read the second or the last.
It will impact you.
*** -My Story.
I'm a 22 Year old from High Point North Carolina, & I've been addicted to opiates a third of my life.
I'm here to ask a legitimate question involving the ever-increasing amount of pain pill prescriptions and heroin overdoses in this country.
I want to tell you basics of my story, the crooked system that promotes addiction, and what we don't do and why, and also what we could & can do.
You may hear many things in this article that make a great amount of sense to you, and you may be disappointed in the lack of knowledge and lack of understanding of drugs in America.
The statistics may surprise you, my personal views might seem new to you, but you will never look at this problem the same way again.
I love America, and know we can change, but I cannot honestly speak patriotically until we change the things that I will bring to your attention.
If you are addicted to any drug, or know somebody close to you who is, this is something you must read and it will change your views for the better.
You will hear a lot of negative things, that sadly are nothing more than facts, but you will find that there is indeed a way out for not only you, but this great country.
My name is Chad Trent.
I was raised by a single mother along with one other sibling.
When my dad was around he constantly smoked weed.
Don't worry, I'm not a blind patriotic republican who thinks weed is the devil, or for that matter even that bad of a substance.
I will say weed, in its current (& completely bogus) classification as a Schedule I narcotic is indeed a gateway drug.
It needs to be classified as legal to show contrast between harmful drugs.
I started out smoking weed at the age of 14 when I'd find roaches (butts of marijuana cigarettes) around my house & smoked them.
When I realized I could escape and distort reality with this drug, it dawned on me that other drugs might be just as fun and maybe less harmless on the count as they were less illegal.
Pills became a part of my life, no matter what they were, and one day I found the one I liked.
Walking pneumonia was the diagnosis.
I was 15 years old when they prescribed me liquid hydrocodone syrup.
I drunk a quarter of the bottle the first night and fell completely in love.
I spent that night nodding in and out of consciousness whilst listening to music.
I recall my mom saying "Don't drink too much or you will get high", this was less of a warning to me and more of a green light.
Needless to say, within two days I was walking around school high as hell with a prescription bottle, which was now filled with water on my fridge at home.
Being the curious young man I am, I found a site whose name I will not mention, which details almost all narcotics and natural medicines.
I studied every drug on the website for a couple of years and became a psychonaut (an individual who tries large numbers of different narcotics) in the making, but enough about me.
- Legal Drug Dealers.
The over-prescription of narcotics is increasing and increasingly alarming.
Don't be fooled by the corporations like the one that took the 'Sizzurp' or 'Purple Drank' off the market.
Activis is nothing more than one of many brands of what rappers promote as 'Purple Drank' or 'Lean'.
You might have heard about it in your favorite song, or maybe in recent news about Justin Bieber (the man your daughter idolizes).
This is nothing more than a particular brand of hydrocodone syrup, which you probably never seen, because generic brands are more common.
Basically it's a synthetic, liquid form of diacetylmorphine, better known as heroin.
Removing 'activis syrup' will not even slightly slow down the drug's abuse; it's only to make the corporation look more humane.
Because doctors wouldn't give your pre-teen a legalized version of the most euphoric and addictive drug in the world- for a measly cold, no-less? WRONG.
Americans are the most 'pill happy' people on the planet, with the average American using 4 or more prescription medications (highest in the world & 80 percent increase since 1990).
This business is NOT about the health of the patients.
If the medication doesn't work, they can simply increase the dosage and generate even more profit off of the drugs inefficiency.
4 Billion Prescriptions are being wrote every year, which averages out to about 13 prescriptions for every man, woman and child in the country.
This is an 830 billion dollar a year business.
Tens of thousands, if not 100 thousand people die from 'properly prescribed medications from hospitals every year.
Just imagine the numbers of deaths from the drugs that target consumers and doctors.
These new blockbuster drugs that you see on your television, with commercials that show (largely irrelevant) clips of people running through fields, and doing yoga with creepy smiles on their faces are sometimes extremely dangerous and sometimes don't work at all.
While the big pharmaceutical companies make billions off of your blindness in a doctor wearing a trusty white coat, they belittle natural remedies that often have less side effects and often are more effective and cost efficient.
Isn't it sickening that these people profit off the trust they instill in you, whilst selling you snake oil? And this isn't your everyday snake oil, because the last time I checked, snake oil doesn't kill you or give you and your children life-long medical and mental complications.
Almost every ADHD medicine can give your child lifelong complications, and I mean scary ones like psychosis and/or suicidal depression.
It's worth knowing that Adderall/amphetamine salts are a legal rendition of methamphetamine.
Just look at the name.
There is a drug that just came out called 'Zohydro', which is a new version of the substance known as hydrocodone/vicoden, except this one contains no acetaminophen.
The FDA approved this medication despite professionals warning that people will die within the first week of its proliferation (based off statistics).
Essentially, it allows heavy users to abuse hydrocodone at record doses without consuming dozens of pills at once that normally contain the main ingredient in Tylenol.
Acetaminophen is the name of that drug, and without it, the hydrocodone becomes IV friendly for users to inject into their veins.
They simply open the capsule and dump the powder out to use like heroin.
Zohydro is greatly unnecessary for anybody to ever specifically need.
They make the argument that the Tylenol can be harmful to your liver, which is true, but similar arguments can be made about the now-larger doses of hydrocodone encapsulated in one pill.
Also, there are drugs such as oxycodone that already have versions that do not contain Tylenol, and it's just as effective, if not more effective than hydrocodone.
The only reason this drug was created is because people in real pain will request it, thinking it's better than its predecessors.
Also, patients may ask for the drug in order to sell on the street as a newer, better and you guessed it, pricier pain pill.
Major pharmaceutical are finding newer ways to pay commission to doctors who push their newer, more expensive drugs on their patients.
Journalists from a non-profit organization called 'ProPublica' are establishing a database that accounts for the money received by physicians from big pharma companies.
Some physicians have received payments up to 1 million dollars in speaking and consulting fees.
A jaw-dropping number of 2 billion dollars is what physicians in America received from pharmaceutical companies in exchange for promoting and pushing individual company's drugs in 2012 alone.
This coming fall, every pharmaceutical company will be required to list payments given to medical professionals.
Yet somehow this long-lived process, in which the public has been largely unaware of, is still legal, shame.
What do you need to do? Well, It goes to show, when you go to your doctor, it's possible the drug he is prescribing you is not in your best interest, but his, and big pharma's interest.
It's sad what they are capable of doing with our trust, to our health, and our pockets.
I would hope that anyone reading this be clear with their doctor about what they want.
Study your condition, try to confirm your doctor's diagnosis, and look up the most effective medicines meant for your specific diagnosis and request those instead.
Don't be afraid to try 'over the counter' remedies, such as natural ones.
It's likely that drugs such as depression, or SSRI medications are overall placebo effect, or do literally nothing at all to individuals.
These drugs may do nothing for you simply because you believe they won't work, if that's indeed the case.
Find a natural drug you think will work, based off of reviews and/or trials, and a combination of your optimism and the drug's process may make the drug even more beneficial.
Study the clinical trials of the medication your doctor prescribed and see if the drug was more effective than the placebo version that was given to participants in said trial.
If the placebo was as anywhere near effective as the actual drug itself, don't go with that drug.
If your body believes it is being healed, it's likely that it will be healed.
Your brain is powerful, use it.
- Non-Recovery The FDA commissioner, Margaret Hamburg recently approved a medication used to block the effects of opiate and heroin overdose.
The drug, naloxone (better known as Narcan) reverses the effects of opiates or heroin, which is seen as unethical to give to patients in any severe pain.
Doing so would send the person into what is known as septic shock, & causes a problem for those actually prescribed the meds they overdose on.
The FDA commissioner approved this medicine to become 'over-the-counter' at pharmacies, and more widely available, given the recent heroin epidemic.
This epidemic is mostly caused by the over-prescription of opiate and heroin like substances such as the one we talked about; Zohydro.
The same Margaret Hamburg who approved of the overdose remedy's availability increase, is indeed the same Margaret Hamburg, who last year approved of the amazingly harmful drug called Zohydro.
Many think the Narcan move was not a coincidence, seeing how she approved of Zohydro, which many professionals told her not to do.
I think I'm using the term correctly when I call her actions nothing more than a catch-22.
'We'll approve of a drug to render the deadly one, that we just approved harmless, brilliant!!'.
Well, it turns out the Narcan can be extremely helpful for users and abusers alike, and if you are a user (or abuser) go to your local pharmacy and request some of these Narcan syringes.
Don't worry, there are no needles; you use the syringe to shoot the medicine up the nasal cavity of the person overdosing.
That of course is only a short-term combat in a person's overall journey of addiction.
You may be an unlucky individual, who lives in a state or county that is largely republican and thinks that Narcan needles may be more harmful than good.
Yes, this is true, where I live; this was the case until recently.
Republicans are becoming the majority in this swing state of North Carolina.
I used to be one myself and am a registered republican (*ducks instinctively) but what I am about to tell you is one of the many causes of my conversion to the dark side (he said sarcastically).
They said the proliferation of the overdose reversal drug would be 'harmful' to my area, yes more harmful than death.
Apparently they thought (and probably still do) that people will willingly do crazy amounts of the drugs they were addicted to, because they got their handy Narcan Needle around.
This is not the case, and if it were, would it still be worth the lives of countless individuals in our state? Like the 94 who have overdosed in my city alone since the beginning of the year? What about the 11 who died? Individuals do not want to overdose PERIOD.
Nobody wants to risk their life, or sadly; their high.
Once the person is injected with narcan they are sent into immediate withdrawals from the drug and feel terribly sick when the drug is injected.
It beats death, but no addict wants to risk having to do this.
I can't believe we live in a world where some people think that a drug that saves lives will cause addiction, and fear that addiction is worse than the death of the individual themselves.
I have many friends who have died from heroin and drugs like it, their lives could have been saved, and these idiots might have had a helping hand in their deaths.
God help us.
It is baffling to me.
Sadly, half of the people who are addicted to drugs don't seek help their entire lives.
There are rehabs spawning up all over the country, they obviously cannot work for free.
If the individual doesn't have insurance or doesn't have to pay, tax payers still pay for their 'recovery'.
Great deals of these rehabilitation centers are incompetent at their job.
I see people leave rehab and relapse the very same day, learning nothing from their experience.
A lot of facilities, well the majority where I live, are religious and may be unhelpful to a large population of addicts.
Many indeed want you to believe there is a higher power in order to fend off your urges.
I personally am a Christian, and I don't see the need for this in any public/government funded rehab facility.
I cannot, and will not say that rehab as a whole is a scam, and I think it's great what some of them do.
It's just what some of them preach, religious or not, that bothers me.
Remember what I told you about your brain, and how powerful it is? Well, for rehab to work, you have to believe it is going to work, you have to want it to work.
If you go to rehab in order to please somebody, other than yourself, it's likely to fail.
Just like when these places tell you, and make you believe the popular saying "Once an addict, always an addict" your brain does something powerful.
Once a professional worker tells you that you are always going to be an addict, you can bet your brain will believe it, and believe it for the rest of your life (hence always).
That's pretty powerful don't you think? You want to know what I think, and KNOW? When a professional tells you that you are going to always be an addict, you will likely always be an addict.
If the human brain can cure physical illnesses with nothing less than the belief that you are cured (it can and does), than why can't your brain cure yourself from addiction? So why does it seem every rehab facility is so amazingly ignorant to the powers of your brain and its ability to heal, to cure? Let me tell you this.
If an individual gets off of these drugs, and through the stages of withdrawal, and seeks support through a therapist, you can indeed no longer be an addict.
You don't have to belittle yourself and call yourself an addict when you fought addiction and you won, guess what, YOU WON!! It may or not be a coincidence that these people that get paid off of your addictions, tell you that you cannot be cured.
These people profit off of your relapse, why would you trust them with such philosophy? If you believe that the brain can heal itself (which the medical community does), then why would you trust such an absurd statement? Well because these people were deemed qualified to do their job.
Right now I am the only person I know who has used this philosophy to combat addiction, and told myself I'm not an addict.
When I did it, I had no support, I've never trusted any corporation or company to give me support.
This is the reason I have relapsed.
You should always use the resources at hand, I didn't.
I was never taught the basics of getting through the first stages of addiction, and that is essential.
In that mistake of mine, lies another problem.
The overall recovery process for addicts is not as progressive of a process, as it should be.
Our government should reach out to these people.
Our government should champion the rehab process and be way more innovative; in this day in age where heroin overdoses and addiction is an ever increasing reality.
Nobody has ever reached out to me, am I supposed to do that myself? Maybe that's why 50% of persons addicted to drugs never seek help in this country.
The drug war is an utter failure.
You can easily score drugs in a maximum security prison.
An individual would have to be insane to think it can allow opiates to be prescribed at such rates in its own country, like some type of bait, and think that hooking the cartels boat of heroin will get anywhere near combating America's drug problem.
The addiction starts here, in our own country.
The DEA shouldn't be teamed up with border patrol, it should be teamed up with the FDA.
The problem lies here.
The problem is your strict convictions of a lenient free economy.
The problem is your own insanity.
You're fighting the wrong war, and willingly.
This country is locking people up for getting high.
This country is locking people up for the drugs they prescribe us.
Mandatory minimums state individuals can get 15 years for personal usage amounts of methamphetamine, like prison will be helpful! We shouldn't be locking people up for getting high; we should be sending them to ever-more innovating rehabs, or ones like in other countries that prove successful.
If you think that imprisonment for possessing personal use amounts of drugs will help anybody, than you are the problem.
This is all coming from someone who has been addicted to a substance, I am not biased, I want help.
I don't want any more of my friends and family to die.
What does law enforcement want? Justice.
Law enforcement is biased.
They are ignorant.
We do need justice, the PEOPLE need justice from the disservice the war on drugs has been on our lives and our friends and families' lives.
We need justice for that incompetence.
We need to look into better philosophies on curing addiction.
We need to look at Portugal and Scandinavia who have had wildly successful and progressive ways of helping addicts.
We need to replace the staff and commissioner of the FDA and reverse their conclusions on new drugs that could do harm to society.
We need to embrace natural remedies, and stop airing commercials for any narcotic, quasi-narcotic, or potentially addictive medications.
We need to stop locking up people for abusing drugs, and instead get them treatment.
We need remove mandatory minimum sentences on drug possession charges.
We need to rethink the war on drugs.
Last but not least we need to start with ourselves, and embrace things like curing addiction instead of believing oneself is always an addict.
We need to start with ourselves and help our loved ones and I'm here to tell you how.
Interventions are essential in recovery.
Family therapy proves largely successful in an adolescent's recovery.
Family feuds and overall problems within the family often seem to be the cause of early drug use.
Parents are usually the ones who will work diligently in order to look out for a young drug users best interest, so we need to stop enabling.
Whatever the opposite of enabling is, do that.
I cannot stress how harmful it is to give your child money if he has a drug habit.
Instead, when your son/daughter/transgender/foster child, any child asks for money, find out what they 'need it for', buy them what they claimed they needed it for in exchange for their participation in discussing their problems and how you can work together to show the child that their life will inevitably go down the drain with a drug addiction.
Show and tell them what rock bottom looks like, and assure them that every individual will experience these things in their addiction.
Let them know addiction hooks young users because they think they have their life ahead of them, but sadly death lies ahead for these people.
Let them know that they will be rewarded regularly for not using, and drug test them to be sure.
Sadly, this country is set-up to keep on failing, and it will take forever before the country establishes the philosophy I have provided to you.
If you do not want to move to Scandinavia, where ideas like some I've mentioned flourish, and continuously prove successful, then begin the process yourself.
If this country won't pay attention and make the moves necessary on combating this disease, then you have to do it yourself.
Whether it's you, a sibling, child, or a friend, I've told you the basics of what proved successful for me, and others.
This article is based off of what very progressive rehabs are doing, or what other countries are doing that we are not.
This article has facts and opinions, with real resources and real experiences.
The free market is set up for these pharmaceutical companies to thrive, bringing new addictive forms of synthetic heroin into your home, being prescribed by doctors looking out for their own interest.
These newer drugs, along with over-prescribing is driving up the prices of pain medications on the streets, leading to the usage of the cheap alternative we all know as heroin.
In return, the drug companies create drugs to get you off the heroin, and these are also addictive.
By using medicines such as methadone, or suboxone, they're profiting off your ill-guided attempts of recovery.
You'll need rehab to get off those drugs too! Then the rehabs are telling you you'll always being an addict, assuring that you relapse one day and come back with more money.
It's a vicious cycle of non-recovery, bringing death to a home near you, and putting pockets in your physicians and stupidly wealthy corporations who are well aware of the dangers, and have ultimately declared what your life is worth.
Today, I believe I'm beating addiction.
I believe that I am NOT always an addict.
I can cure it.
You may be alarmed when I tell you; I am a high school drop-out.
I dropped out in the 9th grade.
I recently got my GED, dropped some old friends and have started college courses.
I'd like to tell you I'm in a field that can put me in a career of helping others.
Right now I am only in computer classes but I have big plans for helping the peoples of my community.
Right now let's start with ourselves and proliferate the knowledge at hand.
Thank you for reading.
This article is also relevant to anybody fighting addiction or knows someone that is.
If you are just simply curious about drugs in America, you might want to read this.
If you only got time to read one section, read the second or the last.
It will impact you.
*** -My Story.
I'm a 22 Year old from High Point North Carolina, & I've been addicted to opiates a third of my life.
I'm here to ask a legitimate question involving the ever-increasing amount of pain pill prescriptions and heroin overdoses in this country.
I want to tell you basics of my story, the crooked system that promotes addiction, and what we don't do and why, and also what we could & can do.
You may hear many things in this article that make a great amount of sense to you, and you may be disappointed in the lack of knowledge and lack of understanding of drugs in America.
The statistics may surprise you, my personal views might seem new to you, but you will never look at this problem the same way again.
I love America, and know we can change, but I cannot honestly speak patriotically until we change the things that I will bring to your attention.
If you are addicted to any drug, or know somebody close to you who is, this is something you must read and it will change your views for the better.
You will hear a lot of negative things, that sadly are nothing more than facts, but you will find that there is indeed a way out for not only you, but this great country.
My name is Chad Trent.
I was raised by a single mother along with one other sibling.
When my dad was around he constantly smoked weed.
Don't worry, I'm not a blind patriotic republican who thinks weed is the devil, or for that matter even that bad of a substance.
I will say weed, in its current (& completely bogus) classification as a Schedule I narcotic is indeed a gateway drug.
It needs to be classified as legal to show contrast between harmful drugs.
I started out smoking weed at the age of 14 when I'd find roaches (butts of marijuana cigarettes) around my house & smoked them.
When I realized I could escape and distort reality with this drug, it dawned on me that other drugs might be just as fun and maybe less harmless on the count as they were less illegal.
Pills became a part of my life, no matter what they were, and one day I found the one I liked.
Walking pneumonia was the diagnosis.
I was 15 years old when they prescribed me liquid hydrocodone syrup.
I drunk a quarter of the bottle the first night and fell completely in love.
I spent that night nodding in and out of consciousness whilst listening to music.
I recall my mom saying "Don't drink too much or you will get high", this was less of a warning to me and more of a green light.
Needless to say, within two days I was walking around school high as hell with a prescription bottle, which was now filled with water on my fridge at home.
Being the curious young man I am, I found a site whose name I will not mention, which details almost all narcotics and natural medicines.
I studied every drug on the website for a couple of years and became a psychonaut (an individual who tries large numbers of different narcotics) in the making, but enough about me.
- Legal Drug Dealers.
The over-prescription of narcotics is increasing and increasingly alarming.
Don't be fooled by the corporations like the one that took the 'Sizzurp' or 'Purple Drank' off the market.
Activis is nothing more than one of many brands of what rappers promote as 'Purple Drank' or 'Lean'.
You might have heard about it in your favorite song, or maybe in recent news about Justin Bieber (the man your daughter idolizes).
This is nothing more than a particular brand of hydrocodone syrup, which you probably never seen, because generic brands are more common.
Basically it's a synthetic, liquid form of diacetylmorphine, better known as heroin.
Removing 'activis syrup' will not even slightly slow down the drug's abuse; it's only to make the corporation look more humane.
Because doctors wouldn't give your pre-teen a legalized version of the most euphoric and addictive drug in the world- for a measly cold, no-less? WRONG.
Americans are the most 'pill happy' people on the planet, with the average American using 4 or more prescription medications (highest in the world & 80 percent increase since 1990).
This business is NOT about the health of the patients.
If the medication doesn't work, they can simply increase the dosage and generate even more profit off of the drugs inefficiency.
4 Billion Prescriptions are being wrote every year, which averages out to about 13 prescriptions for every man, woman and child in the country.
This is an 830 billion dollar a year business.
Tens of thousands, if not 100 thousand people die from 'properly prescribed medications from hospitals every year.
Just imagine the numbers of deaths from the drugs that target consumers and doctors.
These new blockbuster drugs that you see on your television, with commercials that show (largely irrelevant) clips of people running through fields, and doing yoga with creepy smiles on their faces are sometimes extremely dangerous and sometimes don't work at all.
While the big pharmaceutical companies make billions off of your blindness in a doctor wearing a trusty white coat, they belittle natural remedies that often have less side effects and often are more effective and cost efficient.
Isn't it sickening that these people profit off the trust they instill in you, whilst selling you snake oil? And this isn't your everyday snake oil, because the last time I checked, snake oil doesn't kill you or give you and your children life-long medical and mental complications.
Almost every ADHD medicine can give your child lifelong complications, and I mean scary ones like psychosis and/or suicidal depression.
It's worth knowing that Adderall/amphetamine salts are a legal rendition of methamphetamine.
Just look at the name.
There is a drug that just came out called 'Zohydro', which is a new version of the substance known as hydrocodone/vicoden, except this one contains no acetaminophen.
The FDA approved this medication despite professionals warning that people will die within the first week of its proliferation (based off statistics).
Essentially, it allows heavy users to abuse hydrocodone at record doses without consuming dozens of pills at once that normally contain the main ingredient in Tylenol.
Acetaminophen is the name of that drug, and without it, the hydrocodone becomes IV friendly for users to inject into their veins.
They simply open the capsule and dump the powder out to use like heroin.
Zohydro is greatly unnecessary for anybody to ever specifically need.
They make the argument that the Tylenol can be harmful to your liver, which is true, but similar arguments can be made about the now-larger doses of hydrocodone encapsulated in one pill.
Also, there are drugs such as oxycodone that already have versions that do not contain Tylenol, and it's just as effective, if not more effective than hydrocodone.
The only reason this drug was created is because people in real pain will request it, thinking it's better than its predecessors.
Also, patients may ask for the drug in order to sell on the street as a newer, better and you guessed it, pricier pain pill.
Major pharmaceutical are finding newer ways to pay commission to doctors who push their newer, more expensive drugs on their patients.
Journalists from a non-profit organization called 'ProPublica' are establishing a database that accounts for the money received by physicians from big pharma companies.
Some physicians have received payments up to 1 million dollars in speaking and consulting fees.
A jaw-dropping number of 2 billion dollars is what physicians in America received from pharmaceutical companies in exchange for promoting and pushing individual company's drugs in 2012 alone.
This coming fall, every pharmaceutical company will be required to list payments given to medical professionals.
Yet somehow this long-lived process, in which the public has been largely unaware of, is still legal, shame.
What do you need to do? Well, It goes to show, when you go to your doctor, it's possible the drug he is prescribing you is not in your best interest, but his, and big pharma's interest.
It's sad what they are capable of doing with our trust, to our health, and our pockets.
I would hope that anyone reading this be clear with their doctor about what they want.
Study your condition, try to confirm your doctor's diagnosis, and look up the most effective medicines meant for your specific diagnosis and request those instead.
Don't be afraid to try 'over the counter' remedies, such as natural ones.
It's likely that drugs such as depression, or SSRI medications are overall placebo effect, or do literally nothing at all to individuals.
These drugs may do nothing for you simply because you believe they won't work, if that's indeed the case.
Find a natural drug you think will work, based off of reviews and/or trials, and a combination of your optimism and the drug's process may make the drug even more beneficial.
Study the clinical trials of the medication your doctor prescribed and see if the drug was more effective than the placebo version that was given to participants in said trial.
If the placebo was as anywhere near effective as the actual drug itself, don't go with that drug.
If your body believes it is being healed, it's likely that it will be healed.
Your brain is powerful, use it.
- Non-Recovery The FDA commissioner, Margaret Hamburg recently approved a medication used to block the effects of opiate and heroin overdose.
The drug, naloxone (better known as Narcan) reverses the effects of opiates or heroin, which is seen as unethical to give to patients in any severe pain.
Doing so would send the person into what is known as septic shock, & causes a problem for those actually prescribed the meds they overdose on.
The FDA commissioner approved this medicine to become 'over-the-counter' at pharmacies, and more widely available, given the recent heroin epidemic.
This epidemic is mostly caused by the over-prescription of opiate and heroin like substances such as the one we talked about; Zohydro.
The same Margaret Hamburg who approved of the overdose remedy's availability increase, is indeed the same Margaret Hamburg, who last year approved of the amazingly harmful drug called Zohydro.
Many think the Narcan move was not a coincidence, seeing how she approved of Zohydro, which many professionals told her not to do.
I think I'm using the term correctly when I call her actions nothing more than a catch-22.
'We'll approve of a drug to render the deadly one, that we just approved harmless, brilliant!!'.
Well, it turns out the Narcan can be extremely helpful for users and abusers alike, and if you are a user (or abuser) go to your local pharmacy and request some of these Narcan syringes.
Don't worry, there are no needles; you use the syringe to shoot the medicine up the nasal cavity of the person overdosing.
That of course is only a short-term combat in a person's overall journey of addiction.
You may be an unlucky individual, who lives in a state or county that is largely republican and thinks that Narcan needles may be more harmful than good.
Yes, this is true, where I live; this was the case until recently.
Republicans are becoming the majority in this swing state of North Carolina.
I used to be one myself and am a registered republican (*ducks instinctively) but what I am about to tell you is one of the many causes of my conversion to the dark side (he said sarcastically).
They said the proliferation of the overdose reversal drug would be 'harmful' to my area, yes more harmful than death.
Apparently they thought (and probably still do) that people will willingly do crazy amounts of the drugs they were addicted to, because they got their handy Narcan Needle around.
This is not the case, and if it were, would it still be worth the lives of countless individuals in our state? Like the 94 who have overdosed in my city alone since the beginning of the year? What about the 11 who died? Individuals do not want to overdose PERIOD.
Nobody wants to risk their life, or sadly; their high.
Once the person is injected with narcan they are sent into immediate withdrawals from the drug and feel terribly sick when the drug is injected.
It beats death, but no addict wants to risk having to do this.
I can't believe we live in a world where some people think that a drug that saves lives will cause addiction, and fear that addiction is worse than the death of the individual themselves.
I have many friends who have died from heroin and drugs like it, their lives could have been saved, and these idiots might have had a helping hand in their deaths.
God help us.
It is baffling to me.
Sadly, half of the people who are addicted to drugs don't seek help their entire lives.
There are rehabs spawning up all over the country, they obviously cannot work for free.
If the individual doesn't have insurance or doesn't have to pay, tax payers still pay for their 'recovery'.
Great deals of these rehabilitation centers are incompetent at their job.
I see people leave rehab and relapse the very same day, learning nothing from their experience.
A lot of facilities, well the majority where I live, are religious and may be unhelpful to a large population of addicts.
Many indeed want you to believe there is a higher power in order to fend off your urges.
I personally am a Christian, and I don't see the need for this in any public/government funded rehab facility.
I cannot, and will not say that rehab as a whole is a scam, and I think it's great what some of them do.
It's just what some of them preach, religious or not, that bothers me.
Remember what I told you about your brain, and how powerful it is? Well, for rehab to work, you have to believe it is going to work, you have to want it to work.
If you go to rehab in order to please somebody, other than yourself, it's likely to fail.
Just like when these places tell you, and make you believe the popular saying "Once an addict, always an addict" your brain does something powerful.
Once a professional worker tells you that you are always going to be an addict, you can bet your brain will believe it, and believe it for the rest of your life (hence always).
That's pretty powerful don't you think? You want to know what I think, and KNOW? When a professional tells you that you are going to always be an addict, you will likely always be an addict.
If the human brain can cure physical illnesses with nothing less than the belief that you are cured (it can and does), than why can't your brain cure yourself from addiction? So why does it seem every rehab facility is so amazingly ignorant to the powers of your brain and its ability to heal, to cure? Let me tell you this.
If an individual gets off of these drugs, and through the stages of withdrawal, and seeks support through a therapist, you can indeed no longer be an addict.
You don't have to belittle yourself and call yourself an addict when you fought addiction and you won, guess what, YOU WON!! It may or not be a coincidence that these people that get paid off of your addictions, tell you that you cannot be cured.
These people profit off of your relapse, why would you trust them with such philosophy? If you believe that the brain can heal itself (which the medical community does), then why would you trust such an absurd statement? Well because these people were deemed qualified to do their job.
Right now I am the only person I know who has used this philosophy to combat addiction, and told myself I'm not an addict.
When I did it, I had no support, I've never trusted any corporation or company to give me support.
This is the reason I have relapsed.
You should always use the resources at hand, I didn't.
I was never taught the basics of getting through the first stages of addiction, and that is essential.
In that mistake of mine, lies another problem.
The overall recovery process for addicts is not as progressive of a process, as it should be.
Our government should reach out to these people.
Our government should champion the rehab process and be way more innovative; in this day in age where heroin overdoses and addiction is an ever increasing reality.
Nobody has ever reached out to me, am I supposed to do that myself? Maybe that's why 50% of persons addicted to drugs never seek help in this country.
The drug war is an utter failure.
You can easily score drugs in a maximum security prison.
An individual would have to be insane to think it can allow opiates to be prescribed at such rates in its own country, like some type of bait, and think that hooking the cartels boat of heroin will get anywhere near combating America's drug problem.
The addiction starts here, in our own country.
The DEA shouldn't be teamed up with border patrol, it should be teamed up with the FDA.
The problem lies here.
The problem is your strict convictions of a lenient free economy.
The problem is your own insanity.
You're fighting the wrong war, and willingly.
This country is locking people up for getting high.
This country is locking people up for the drugs they prescribe us.
Mandatory minimums state individuals can get 15 years for personal usage amounts of methamphetamine, like prison will be helpful! We shouldn't be locking people up for getting high; we should be sending them to ever-more innovating rehabs, or ones like in other countries that prove successful.
If you think that imprisonment for possessing personal use amounts of drugs will help anybody, than you are the problem.
This is all coming from someone who has been addicted to a substance, I am not biased, I want help.
I don't want any more of my friends and family to die.
What does law enforcement want? Justice.
Law enforcement is biased.
They are ignorant.
We do need justice, the PEOPLE need justice from the disservice the war on drugs has been on our lives and our friends and families' lives.
We need justice for that incompetence.
We need to look into better philosophies on curing addiction.
We need to look at Portugal and Scandinavia who have had wildly successful and progressive ways of helping addicts.
We need to replace the staff and commissioner of the FDA and reverse their conclusions on new drugs that could do harm to society.
We need to embrace natural remedies, and stop airing commercials for any narcotic, quasi-narcotic, or potentially addictive medications.
We need to stop locking up people for abusing drugs, and instead get them treatment.
We need remove mandatory minimum sentences on drug possession charges.
We need to rethink the war on drugs.
Last but not least we need to start with ourselves, and embrace things like curing addiction instead of believing oneself is always an addict.
We need to start with ourselves and help our loved ones and I'm here to tell you how.
Interventions are essential in recovery.
Family therapy proves largely successful in an adolescent's recovery.
Family feuds and overall problems within the family often seem to be the cause of early drug use.
Parents are usually the ones who will work diligently in order to look out for a young drug users best interest, so we need to stop enabling.
Whatever the opposite of enabling is, do that.
I cannot stress how harmful it is to give your child money if he has a drug habit.
Instead, when your son/daughter/transgender/foster child, any child asks for money, find out what they 'need it for', buy them what they claimed they needed it for in exchange for their participation in discussing their problems and how you can work together to show the child that their life will inevitably go down the drain with a drug addiction.
Show and tell them what rock bottom looks like, and assure them that every individual will experience these things in their addiction.
Let them know addiction hooks young users because they think they have their life ahead of them, but sadly death lies ahead for these people.
Let them know that they will be rewarded regularly for not using, and drug test them to be sure.
Sadly, this country is set-up to keep on failing, and it will take forever before the country establishes the philosophy I have provided to you.
If you do not want to move to Scandinavia, where ideas like some I've mentioned flourish, and continuously prove successful, then begin the process yourself.
If this country won't pay attention and make the moves necessary on combating this disease, then you have to do it yourself.
Whether it's you, a sibling, child, or a friend, I've told you the basics of what proved successful for me, and others.
This article is based off of what very progressive rehabs are doing, or what other countries are doing that we are not.
This article has facts and opinions, with real resources and real experiences.
The free market is set up for these pharmaceutical companies to thrive, bringing new addictive forms of synthetic heroin into your home, being prescribed by doctors looking out for their own interest.
These newer drugs, along with over-prescribing is driving up the prices of pain medications on the streets, leading to the usage of the cheap alternative we all know as heroin.
In return, the drug companies create drugs to get you off the heroin, and these are also addictive.
By using medicines such as methadone, or suboxone, they're profiting off your ill-guided attempts of recovery.
You'll need rehab to get off those drugs too! Then the rehabs are telling you you'll always being an addict, assuring that you relapse one day and come back with more money.
It's a vicious cycle of non-recovery, bringing death to a home near you, and putting pockets in your physicians and stupidly wealthy corporations who are well aware of the dangers, and have ultimately declared what your life is worth.
Today, I believe I'm beating addiction.
I believe that I am NOT always an addict.
I can cure it.
You may be alarmed when I tell you; I am a high school drop-out.
I dropped out in the 9th grade.
I recently got my GED, dropped some old friends and have started college courses.
I'd like to tell you I'm in a field that can put me in a career of helping others.
Right now I am only in computer classes but I have big plans for helping the peoples of my community.
Right now let's start with ourselves and proliferate the knowledge at hand.
Thank you for reading.