Prescription Drug abuse is on the rise. Imagine sitting in your living room on Christmas break. It is your senior year and you open a text from your best friend. The text states " My aunt killed herself." How do I process this information? How do I make sure that I say the right thing? How does a family cope with this? These were all questions I asked myself. My best friend just lost her aunt, and I needed to help. This was during Covid-19 when everything was shut down. As soon as I walked into the funeral my best friend teared up knowing that I came for support.
Have you ever been rummaging through your medicine cabinet and realized you have many old prescriptions laying around. According to the CDC prescription drugs hit a rise in 2020-2022 due to Covid-19.
We all felt the isolation that came with Covid. Researchers say that when humans are isolated their mental health decreases.
Have you had a time where your mental health was not the best?
According to the CDC, people with a mental illness or have experienced isolation are more likely to abuse.
This can include,
- Prescription Drugs
- Alcohol
- Over The Counter Drugs
- Illegal Drugs
This can lead to addiction, change in personality, mental impairments, decrease ability to breathe, coma or even death.
Even though the graphs show we have a problem. Are all overdoses from opioids being accounted for?
Due to every state having different jurisdictions on what technically is counted for as an opioid overdose. This means that “Drug overdose deaths may involve multiple drugs; therefore, a single death might be included in more than one category when describing the number of drug overdose deaths involving specific drugs. For example, a death that involved both heroin and fentanyl would be included in both the number of drug overdose deaths involving heroin and the number of drug overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone.”(nvss)
What is I stop?
How do we help stop prescribing as much?
I stop is a opioid monitoring system. I stop makes doctors and pharmacist check the data base to make sure patients are being prescribed to much. It also is a double check patient are not doctor hoping. When this occurs patients go from one doctor to another and get prescribed to much.
Now this all seems nice but what are the flaws?
-One downfall is mental health prescriptions. Due to mental health having a stigma many places can have the patient opt out of having the information released. Meaning there can still be abuse happening.
-Another flaw is that this system is only in New York. Although according to the article "Decoding New York State’s Prescription Monitoring Program" states that with the decrease of prescription drugs being prescribed the less overdoes they have. If we implemented these programs into every state then the decrease would show.
Social media can have a huge role on stopping opioid abuse.
I mean how many people have more than one social media?
As most teens and adults have social media the word of opioid abuse can get around quickly. Using social media we can get the world to understand how scary it can be, what the symptoms are,and the more knowledge they know the better off society is.
If we have the information out there the more normal it will be to get help or know how bad it is.