By: Alexandria Addesso
The human race has long had a love affair with euphoria. Drugs and other substances have long been used to reached such a state. Currently prescription pills seem to be the drug of choice. Being that they are considered legal, to a degree, many people feel that they are safer than the average street drug, which has led everyone from soccer moms to teenagers picking up the pill popping habit.
Common prescription painkillers include morphine, codeine, oxycodone, hydrocodone, methadone, fentanyl, meperidine, hydrocodone, and acetaminophen. But what exactly do these prescription pills contain? Most prescription pills that are abused are painkiller drugs. These drugs are known as opioids. Heroin is also an opioid. According to drugabuse.gov, a recent study showed that nearly half of young heroin users surveyed reported that they started out using prescription pills.
So why are such dangerous drugs on the market and so easily accessible to anyone with a prescription? Because the market for them is insane! In the past 25 years the number of prescriptions written for opioids went from about 71 million to 206 million in the United States alone, which is a win for pharmaceutical companies.
Currently the United States consumes about 75 percent of all the prescription pills in the world despite only making up 5 percent of the globe’s population. Yet most users are not those receiving prescriptions. Prescription pills, has become a full blown black market with thousands of doctors being busted every year for over-prescribing these dangerous drugs. Those wholesaling such drugs can make as much as any other drug kingpins if not a lot, lot more. Business is good for those who sell these prescription drugs because the price is high. But once the user becomes so addicted and low on funds that they can no longer afford the pricy pills, heroin is a cheap alternative. As mentioned early heroin, like prescription painkillers, is an opioid and thus creates the same “high” just to different degrees.
Heroin has long been demonized by society, but these prescription pills have not. If we could shift the “safe” and “normalized” usage associated with painkillers to that of the connotation that comes with heroin, we could possibly change the culture.
The human race has long had a love affair with euphoria. Drugs and other substances have long been used to reached such a state. Currently prescription pills seem to be the drug of choice. Being that they are considered legal, to a degree, many people feel that they are safer than the average street drug, which has led everyone from soccer moms to teenagers picking up the pill popping habit.
Common prescription painkillers include morphine, codeine, oxycodone, hydrocodone, methadone, fentanyl, meperidine, hydrocodone, and acetaminophen. But what exactly do these prescription pills contain? Most prescription pills that are abused are painkiller drugs. These drugs are known as opioids. Heroin is also an opioid. According to drugabuse.gov, a recent study showed that nearly half of young heroin users surveyed reported that they started out using prescription pills.
So why are such dangerous drugs on the market and so easily accessible to anyone with a prescription? Because the market for them is insane! In the past 25 years the number of prescriptions written for opioids went from about 71 million to 206 million in the United States alone, which is a win for pharmaceutical companies.
Currently the United States consumes about 75 percent of all the prescription pills in the world despite only making up 5 percent of the globe’s population. Yet most users are not those receiving prescriptions. Prescription pills, has become a full blown black market with thousands of doctors being busted every year for over-prescribing these dangerous drugs. Those wholesaling such drugs can make as much as any other drug kingpins if not a lot, lot more. Business is good for those who sell these prescription drugs because the price is high. But once the user becomes so addicted and low on funds that they can no longer afford the pricy pills, heroin is a cheap alternative. As mentioned early heroin, like prescription painkillers, is an opioid and thus creates the same “high” just to different degrees.
Heroin has long been demonized by society, but these prescription pills have not. If we could shift the “safe” and “normalized” usage associated with painkillers to that of the connotation that comes with heroin, we could possibly change the culture.
