by Kieron McFadden
There is a high probability that either you or someone you know is hooked on prescription drugs as addiction to prescribed medications reaches epidemic levels.
According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), approximately 48.7 million Americans aged 12 or older reported non-medical use of prescription drugs at some point in their lifetime. These figures do not include over-the-counter drugs.
Full-blown addiction to prescription drugs affects several million people in the U.S. alone, with all the dreadful effects that bring misery to the life of the drug addict and his or her family, including relentless cravings, and the physical and mental agony of severe withdrawal symptoms.
The most common prescription drugs that lead to addiction include the three broad categories of opiods, central nervous system depressants and stimulants.
Opiods are most commonly prescribed to control pain and examples of these drugs include Oxy Contin, Perocet, and morphine.
Central nervous system depressants are usually prescribed to treat sleeping disorders and include drugs such as Valium and Xanax.
The stimulants are usually prescribed for those with obesity, or for those - including many children - diagnosed as suffering from bogus and largely discredited psychiatric disorders such as Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Some notorious examples of such dangerous mind-altering drugs include Adderall and Ritalin.
Most prescription drug addiction starts as a result of being legally prescribed the drugs for an illness or injury and the drive behind the massive expansion of prescription drug use and abuse has been the massive profit-driven advertising campaigns of the drug manufacturers and grass-roots level marketing by psychiatrists.
We re now reaping a bleak harvest of human misery as a consequence of those psycho-pharmaceutical efforts to drive drugs in on our societies as increasing numbers of people end up addicted to prescription drugs and start to obtain them illegally or end up hooked on other drugs as a result of prescription drug addiction. And it is already well understood that soaring drug addiction fuels the soaring crime rate.
In the words of one American victim of the pharmaceutical epidemic:
"I had a minor operation when I was a teenager and was prescribed Vicodin for the pain. Very soon after I started taking them I became physically addicted. By the time I finished high school I thought I had to take the drugs every day to feel normal. Eventually I moved onto harder prescriptions like Oxy Contin and within a few months my Oxy Contin habit cost me $100.00 per day. When you first start taking prescriptions you think it's ok because someone has prescribed them to you. I had no idea what I was getting myself into."
The worst of ironies is that modern advances in nutritional science have shown the medical drugging culture to be seriously flawed in that drugs actually CREATE more illness than they purport to "handle" (thus requiring more drugs to deal with the damage they do to the body) and in the vast majority of cases are about as state-of-the-art as leeches as agents of true healing.
To take just one example: common paracetemol-based painkillers are highly toxic to the liver and as a result in the UK alone 30 000 people a year wind up in hospital. Professor Carter of Edinburgh University estimates that one in ten liver transplants is due to damage caused by paracetemol overdose.
Liver malfunction can itself produce a slew of physical illnesses requiring treatment, along with depression for which your psychiatrist will no doubt prescribe an antidepressant. Antidepressants in their turn act as chemical poisons upon the body and further damage its systems, requiring more medical intervention.
As just one example of how little we actually need a drug in most cases: insomnia, for which the pharmaceutical products Xanax and Mogadon are so often prescribed, is best handled by the "nutraceuticals" calcium, magnesium, zinc and trpytophan and the vitamins B3, B5, B6 and C.
The pharmaceuticals, being substances foreign to the body, do it damage - the so-called "side effects." The nutraceuticals, being substances natural to the body and part of its evolution are not harmful. And the nutraceuticals are a whole lot less expensive too!
Nutrition, as we say - and as science now proves - is better than drugs.
