Prescription Addiction Quotes

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I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven-headed and living in a filthy squat. That was until I became one...
Cathryn Kemp (Painkiller Addict: From Wreckage to Redemption - My True Story)
Loose diagnosis is causing a national drug overdose of medication. Six percent of our people are addicted to prescription drugs, and there are now more emergency room visits and deaths due to legal prescription drugs than to illegal street drugs.6
Allen Frances (Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt Against Out-Of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life)
My doctors, who are not cavalier with prescriptions, give me this medication because I have earned their trust. And yet, with mounting government and public pressure, my doctors’ hands are becoming increasingly tied. They apologetically explain to me why they are required to make the medication even harder for me to get, against their own medical judgment. If the day ever comes when they aren’t allowed to prescribe Percocet to me at all, it may well be the end of the minimal quality of life I fight so hard to achieve.
Michael Bihovsky
Dr. Bone Specialist came in, made me stand up and hobble across the room, checked my reflexes, and then made me lie down on the table. He bent my right knee this way and that, up and down, all the way out to the side and in. Then he did the same with my left leg. He ordered X rays then started to leave the room. I panicked. I MUST GET DRUGS. "What can I take for the pain?" I asked him before he got out the door. "You can take some over the counter ibuprofen," he suggested. "But I wouldn't take more than nine a day." I choked. Nine a day? I'd been popping forty. Nine a day? Like hell. I couldn't even go to the bathroom on my own, I hadn't slept in three weeks, and my normally sunny cheery disposition had turned into that of a very rabid dog. If I didn't get good drugs and get them now, it was straight to Shooter's World and then Walgreens pharmacy for me. "I don't think you understand," I explained. "I can't go to work. I have spent the last four days with my mother who is addicted to QVC, watching jewelry shows, doll shows and make-up shows. I almost ordered a beef-jerky maker! Give me something, or I'm going to use your calf muscles to make the first batch!" Without further ado, he hastily scribbled out a prescription for some codeine and was gone. I was happy. My mother, however, had lost the ability to speak.
Laurie Notaro (The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life)
The advertise their products in such a fashion as to make it seem wonderful to drink their ethanol products. It does not matter if they give their products fancy name like Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir, or if they put bubbles in an ethanol product and call it champagne or beer- everyone is selling ethanol.
Chris Prentiss (The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure: A Holistic Approach to Total Recovery)
New Rule: Stop pretending your drugs are morally superior to my drugs because you get yours at a store. This week, they released the autopsy report on Anna Nicole Smith, and the cause of death was what I always thought it was: mad cow. No, it turns out she had nine different prescription drugs in her—which, in the medical field, is known as the “full Limbaugh.” They opened her up, and a Walgreens jumped out. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, sedatives, Valium, methadone—this woman was killed by her doctor, who is a glorified bartender. I’m not going to say his name, but only because (a) I don’t want to get sued, and (b) my back is killing me. This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of a famous government report. I was sixteen in 1972, and I remember how excited we were when Nixon’s much ballyhooed National Commission on Drug Abuse came out and said pot should be legalized. It was a moment of great hope for common sense—and then, just like Bush did with the Iraq Study Group, Nixon took the report and threw it in the garbage, and from there the ’70s went right into disco and colored underpants. This week in American Scientist, a magazine George Bush wouldn’t read if he got food poisoning in Mexico and it was the only thing he could reach from the toilet, described a study done in England that measured the lethality of various drugs, and found tobacco and alcohol far worse than pot, LSD, or Ecstasy—which pretty much mirrors my own experiments in this same area. The Beatles took LSD and wrote Sgt. Pepper—Anna Nicole Smith took legal drugs and couldn’t remember the number for nine-one-one. I wish I had more time to go into the fact that the drug war has always been about keeping black men from voting by finding out what they’re addicted to and making it illegal—it’s a miracle our government hasn’t outlawed fat white women yet—but I leave with one request: Would someone please just make a bumper sticker that says, “I’m a stoner, and I vote.
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
What is the number one cause of death in the United States? It's not high cholesterol or accidents by cars, planes or trains. It's not wars. It's not drug addiction, and it's not even disease, so that lets out heart disease, cancer, strokes, diabetes and more. In Third World countries, infections and malnutrition are major causes of loss of life. But in the United States the number one cause of death is not any of these things. IT IS PRESCRIPTION DRUGS (Null, TW).
Dr. Sherry Rogers
For increasing numbers of people, especially young people, prescription drugs are the first exposure to addictive substances and the first stepping-stone to future addictive use.
Anna Lembke (Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop)
One of my patients, a physician addicted to prescription drugs,
Edith Eger (The Gift: 14 Lessons to Save Your Life)
Still, I knew rehab was important. So I listened. I went to every class. I held hands with strangers. With suburban mummies who’d gotten addicted to prescription pills, and a preacher’s son who’d fallen into the arms of heroin, and a Russian oligarch’s daughter who, like me, had snorted pounds and pounds of cocaine to numb the feeling that the world was closing in on you from all angles. I wrote letters to my family and friends. Angry letters. Apologetic letters. Funny letters. Then I burned them all. I couldn’t write Stardust shite, though. Everything I had to say to her—every single groveling word—had to be said in person.
L.J. Shen (Midnight Blue)
The majority of the common people do not realize that calling 911 may result in a stressed out armed police officer that has a range of medical issues and is taking potent prescription drugs being sent to out to them.
Steven Magee
If those underlying conditions aren't treated, the return of those symptoms may cause us so much discomfort that we'll go back to using addictive drugs or alcohol to obtain relief. That's the primary reason there is such a high rate of relapse among people who have become dependent of alcohol and addictive drugs. It has little to do with alcohol and addiction themselves and almost everything to do with the original causes that created the dependency.
Chris Prentiss (The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure: A Holistic Approach to Total Recovery)
Drug abuse and addiction are very real problems, the remedy for which is education and medical treatment, not incarceration. In fact, the most abused drugs in the United States now appear to be oxycodone and other prescription painkillers. Should
Sam Harris (Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion)
She fusses for the wrong reasons. She's not really fussing because severe weather is in today's forecast, or because my brother Ethan died, leaving her with only one child to fret about, or because I'm addicted to prescription drugs--which she doesn't even know--but because Mercury is in retrograde.
Khristina Chess
.,,women are numbed enough to endure rough sex acts through extreme humiliation. When alcohol isn’t enough and the pain spirals into addiction, porn stars are sent to local doctors in conspiracy with the porn industry to receive prescriptions for Vicodin, Xanax, Valium and other anti-anxiety drugs to help them cope with the trauma.
Shelley Lubben (Truth Behind the Fantasy of Porn: The Greatest Illusion on Earth)
Often, women's symptoms are brushed off as the result of depression, anxiety, or the all-purpose favorite: stress. Sometimes, they are attributed to women's normal physiological states and cycles: to menstrual cramps, menopause, or even being a new mom. Sometimes, other aspects of their identity seem to take center stage: fat women report that any ailment is blamed on their weight; trans women find that all their symptoms are attributed to hormone therapy; black women are stereotyped as addicts looking for prescription drugs, their reports of pain doubted entirely. Whatever the particular attribution, there is often the same current of distrust: the sense that women are not very accurate judges of when something is really, truly wrong in their bodies.
Maya Dusenbery (Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick)
The UK needs a post Brexit US trade deal like a hole in the head. Given America's out-of-control opioid crisis, fuelled by prescription drug addiction, along with an obesity epidemic like the world has never seen, why on earth would the UK want to open its doors to US healthcare companies ? So that they can wreak untold havoc and destroy our National Health Service ? No thanks !
Alex Morritt (Lines & Lenses)
A patient complains of feeling nervous or fearful. These feelings and behaviors suggest that the patient has an anxiety disorder, and the doctor prescribes whatever drug will most probably work for an anxiety disorder. However, there's no conclusive way to tell that this patient definitely has an anxiety disorder. Even if the doctor did get the diagnosis correct, there's a great deal of variation regarding which drug class (for example, anti-anxiety drugs versus antidepressants) a particular individual will respond to and which drug within a class (for example, Prozac versus Zoloft) will work best. If the drug doesn't work, the doctor will try the next one on the list and so on, thus delaying treatment success and complicating the process with the mix-and-match type of treatment.
Chris Prentiss (The Alcoholism and Addiction Cure: A Holistic Approach to Total Recovery)
Ohio was an apt forum for this showdown. By 2016, 2.3 million people in the state—approximately 20 percent of the total population—received a prescription for opioids. Half of the children who were in foster care across the state had opioid-addicted parents. People were dying from overdoses at such a rate that local coroners had run out of room in which to store all the bodies and were forced to seek makeshift alternatives.
Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)
But Jackson was experienced enough to know that the scale of the challenge ahead was totally unrealistic, yet the alternative probably meant utter and complete ruination for him. The whole entire enterprise was delusional. Michael surely knew it, but likely hoped that at some point an exit strategy would magically appear. He was a frail, deeply insecure, vulnerable, unfit, 50-year-old with a chronic addiction to a wide variety of prescription medicines, and the whole tour would have seemed just what it was: an impossible mountain for him to climb.
Matt Richards (83 Minutes: The Doctor, the Damage and the Shocking Death of Michael Jackson)
A wide diversity of treatment and social support models needs to be made available to drug users, ranging from one-strike-you’re-out abstinence to harm reduction, methadone maintenance, buprenorphine detox, heroin prescription, and subsidized employment initiatives. Treatment programs also need to take advantage of the moments of life crisis that drive long-term injectors to seek treatment. Most of the spur of the moment, crisis-driven windows of opportunity for changing the lives of street addicts are missed because underfunding, exacerbated by neoliberal audit culture, forces treatment programs to exclude risky patients.
Philippe Bourgois (Righteous Dopefiend (California Series in Public Anthropology Book 21))
In 1994, Friedman wrote a memo marked “Very Confidential” to Raymond, Mortimer, and Richard Sackler. The market for cancer pain was significant, Friedman pointed out: four million prescriptions a year. In fact, there were three-quarters of a million prescriptions just for MS Contin. “We believe that the FDA will restrict our initial launch of OxyContin to the Cancer pain market,” Friedman wrote. But what if, over time, the drug extended beyond that? There was a much greater market for other types of pain: back pain, neck pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia. According to the wrestler turned pain doctor John Bonica, one in three Americans was suffering from untreated chronic pain. If that was even somewhat true, it represented an enormous untapped market. What if you could figure out a way to market this new drug, OxyContin, to all those patients? The plan would have to remain secret for the time being, but in his memo to the Sacklers, Friedman confirmed that the intention was “to expand the use of OxyContin beyond Cancer patients to chronic non-malignant pain.” This was a hugely audacious scheme. In the 1940s, Arthur Sackler had watched the introduction of Thorazine. It was a “major” tranquilizer that worked wonders on patients who were psychotic. But the way the Sackler family made its first great fortune was with Arthur’s involvement in marketing the “minor” tranquilizers Librium and Valium. Thorazine was perceived as a heavy-duty solution for a heavy-duty problem, but the market for the drug was naturally limited to people suffering from severe enough conditions to warrant a major tranquilizer. The beauty of the minor tranquilizers was that they were for everyone. The reason those drugs were such a success was that they were pills that you could pop to relieve an extraordinary range of common psychological and emotional ailments. Now Arthur’s brothers and his nephew Richard would make the same pivot with a painkiller: they had enjoyed great success with MS Contin, but it was perceived as a heavy-duty drug for cancer. And cancer was a limited market. If you could figure out a way to market OxyContin not just for cancer but for any sort of pain, the profits would be astronomical. It was “imperative,” Friedman told the Sacklers, “that we establish a literature” to support this kind of positioning. They would suggest OxyContin for “the broadest range of use.” Still, they faced one significant hurdle. Oxycodone is roughly twice as potent as morphine, and as a consequence OxyContin would be a much stronger drug than MS Contin. American doctors still tended to take great care in administering strong opioids because of long-established concerns about the addictiveness of these drugs. For years, proponents of MS Contin had argued that in an end-of-life situation, when someone is in a mortal fight with cancer, it was a bit silly to worry about the patient’s getting hooked on morphine. But if Purdue wanted to market a powerful opioid like OxyContin for less acute, more persistent types of pain, one challenge would be the perception, among physicians, that opioids could be very addictive. If OxyContin was going to achieve its full commercial potential, the Sacklers and Purdue would have to undo that perception.
Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)
How to handle the stress of it all when you don’t even know that your life is stressful? Women saying “my nerves are shot” was the closest anyone came to examining the situation. What they didn’t discuss, though, they felt. That’s what substances were for. Every adult I knew was addicted to something—mostly cigarettes or booze. Also pills, both prescribed and gotten by other means. The women of my mom’s family, who had grown up in Wichita with doctors nearby during decades when health care was cheaper, were sold on the idea of prescriptions for symptoms rooted in psychological strife. Most of them were on “thyroid medicine” for exhaustion, “nerve pills” for anxiety.
Sarah Smarsh (Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth)
One's prescription can seem extensive--even overwhelming, depending on an individual's circumstance--and I can imagine the prospects exciting few people of any stripe. Lots of eaters are going to balk at abstaining, but to learn that recovery is going to require rigorous honesty, or more attention to spirit, could be far more off-putting. Then again, who gets excited about any serious treatment prescription? Certainly not the cancer patient told she'll have to undergo radiation, or the back patient ordered to a month's uninterrupted bed rest, or the lung patient told he'll need a double transplant. To some, the flaw of those comparisons will be their being equated with food addiction, and that is the rub, entirely. The medical profession and the public at large don't see that they are equivalent. The consequences of obesity (the chief consequence of food addiction) constitute the fastest-growing, and soon the gravest, threat to public health. Obesity is suicide on lay-away: It has plenty of time to degrade quality of life before finally ending life prematurely.
Michael Prager (Fat Boy Thin Man)
They should let some people into the library by prescription only. For serious, books about architecture are Denny's pornography. Yeah, first it's a few rocks. Then it's fan-tracery vaulting. My point is, this is America. You start out with hand jobs and progress to orgies. You smoke some dope and then, the big H. This is our whole culture of bigger, better, stronger, faster. The key word is progress. In America, if your addiction isn't always new and improved, you're a failure.
Anonymous
Our situation is much like that of a little girl who was taken by her mother to visit a chiropractor friend of mine. Her mother said, “I think something is wrong with my daughter. She is a very quiet little girl and always well behaved, but never once have I heard her laugh. In fact, she rarely even smiles.” My friend examined her and discovered a spinal misalignment that, she judged, would give the girl a terrific headache all the time. Fortunately, it was one of those misalignments that a chiropractor can correct easily and permanently. She made the adjustment—and the girl broke into a big laugh, the first her mother had ever heard. The omnipresent pain in her head, which she had come to accept as normal, was miraculously gone. Many of you might doubt that we live in a “sea of pain.” I feel pretty good right now myself. But I also carry a memory of a far more profound state of well-being, connectedness, and intensity of awareness that felt, at the time, like my birthright. Which state is normal? Could it be that we are bravely making the best of things? How much of our dysfunctional, consumptive behavior is simply a futile attempt to run away from a pain that is in fact everywhere? Running from one purchase to another, one addictive fix to the next, a new car, a new cause, a new spiritual idea, a new self-help book, a bigger number in the bank account, the next news story, we gain each time a brief respite from feeling pain. The wound at its source never vanishes though. In the absence of distraction—those moments of what we call “boredom”—we can feel its discomfort. Of course, any behavior that alleviates pain without healing its source can become addictive. We should therefore hesitate to cast judgment on anyone exhibiting addictive behavior (a category that probably includes nearly all of us). What we see as greed or weakness might merely be fumbling attempts to meet a need, when the true object of that need is unavailable. In that case the usual prescriptions for more discipline, self-control, or responsibility are counterproductive.
Anonymous
Transformation happens when we see our own crippling brokenness and need for God’s grace in the face and story of the addict in front of us. When addicts are not just the heroin pushers or prescription pill junkies “out there,” but are in our pews and among us, we are in the right position to begin helping addicts step into recovery. And this identification can’t be emphasized enough: my own secret cravings, patterns of self-destructive behavior and unchecked forms of consumption (of money, power, approval—you name it) may not manifest themselves in quite the same way as those of the crack addict in front of me, but they fall within the same realm of human bondage. So getting addicts into recovery means first standing in solidarity with addicts, recognizing that their plight and their stories are hitched to our own and in many ways are similar.
Jonathan Benz (The Recovery-Minded Church: Loving and Ministering to People With Addiction)
When addicts are not just the heroin pushers or prescription pill junkies “out there,” but are in our pews and among us, we are in the right position to begin helping addicts step into recovery.
Jonathan Benz (The Recovery-Minded Church: Loving and Ministering to People With Addiction)
Being addicted to soft-porn romance novels in Ithaca, Georgia, was like filling a prescription for head lice or genital herpes. It just wasn’t the kind of thing you went around bragging about, not if you were a good Southern girl, anyway, from a good Southern family.
Cathy Holton (Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes (Kudzu Debutantes, #1))
Romance is an adventurous odyssey. Falling in love in an experience unlike any other. Love stories capturing the madness, struggles, anguish, excitement, adventure, passion, hope, relief, and wonder of that journey give us an opportunity to experience the magic all over again. Perpetuating myths of addiction, simplistic and formulaic prescription, and manipulation and exploitation of innate human emotions are at best insulting to the reader if not downright unseemly.
K.J. Kilton
This is a particular problem in the U.S., which makes up less than 5% of the global population but consumes 80% of the world’s supply of opioid prescription drugs.4 By 2012, 15,000 Americans were dying each year from prescription pill overdoses, more than from heroin and cocaine combined.5 In 2013, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) named painkiller addictions the worst drug epidemic in U.S. history.
Jo Marchant (Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body)
Nobody in a position of real power and influence in government has the courage to say, publicly: "We made a mistake. Certain drugs which are now illegal can be used by healthy adults with relative safety and no threat of addiction, but you have to know what their effects are and how to use them properly. These include most psychedelics. Other drugs can be used safely by most people, but could be habituating to a few. Those few must have access to good medical care if they get into trouble. Some drugs seem to be either harmful or addicting to most users, and we will de our best to inform you fully regarding their effects and track records, as we now do with prescription drugs. Drug education will be provided across the country and the teachers will no longer be police or politicians, but physicians, chemist and pharmacologist who specialize in this field.
Alexander Shulgin, Ann Shulgin
Most folks are doing the very best they can, and all they desire is to be cared for—especially at home. But many people don’t realize what they’re seeking, so they falsely perceive that more wealth, control of others, or the transient pleasures of addictive behaviors will make them feel happy and fulfilled. And often, money, fame, and career success—or the use of drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, or prescription medications— do bring the illusion of acceptance, freedom, and affection. Only when these individuals peel away the motivations that leave them participating in destructive behaviors do they identify their real needs.
Rebecca Linder Hintze (Healing Your Family History: 5 Steps to Break Free of Destructive Patterns)
The Pythagoreans had been instructed to ‘never do anything without previous deliberation: in the morning forming a plan of what was to be done later, and at night to review the day’s actions’.13 Certainly, we can imagine that if we were to be bothered to practise both these morning previews and evening reviews, considering best approaches ahead of time and later holding ourselves to account, we would live and breathe these Stoic principles more effectively than a person who merely brings them half-remembered to mind when it is too late to fully benefit from them. It sounds, though, like a lot of work. It might, however, start with a thirty-second reminder to be the best person we can be, to not attach our emotional well-being to things outside of us, to watch out for known trouble spots; likewise, we can round up the day with as brief a look back at how we behaved, whether we let ourselves down, if there’s anything we should change tomorrow. It should be neither prescriptive nor arduous. A regular period of quiet solitude helps create a bedrock of self-sufficiency that accompanies us into the social hours ahead. As the addictive pleasures and miseries of electronic communication and phone-browsing offer themselves to us every minute of the day and night, we forget the benefits of time spent calmly with and within ourselves. If we are able to find time and space each day to redress the balance, and if we use it to remind ourselves that so much of our life has nothing to do with us, and that it is only with our thoughts and actions that we need to concern ourselves, we will soon find that our centre of gravity returns to its correct place.
Derren Brown (Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine)
Drinkers at social events will tell you they don’t need to drink. But, when the next bit of anxiety comes up, they grab another glass. Smokers will tell you they enjoy lighting up. They’ll tell you they feel better right after a cigarette. And nearly all of them will tell you they really want to quit—they’re just not quite ready yet. Workaholics will tell you they enjoy what they do, or at least feel a sense of purpose, while stretching themselves to the breaking point. They’ll tell you they have to do it. Some will even admit that it makes them feel important. They’ll promise to get control of their schedules… as soon as the next project is done. Compulsive shoppers love to hit the stores. They call it “stress management” or “retail therapy.” For a few hours, they’ll say, everything is perfect. After they get the goodies home, though, some will tell you they feel empty or even disgusted. They’d love a simpler life—but only if they first can buy the best of everything. People who misuse prescription drugs will tell you the pills ease their pain. The pain from a surgery or disease was so extreme that they got prescribed a medication, and soon they had to take more and more to keep the pain away. They’ll say they hate being constantly constipated and forgetting where they are, but it’s the only way they believe they can function and feel normal.
Jean-Francois Benoist (Addicted to the Monkey Mind: Change the Programming That Sabotages Your Life)
Overall, more males than females abuse prescription drugs in all age groups except the youngest (aged 12 to 17 years); that is, females in this age group exceed males in the nonmedical use of all psychotherapeutics, including pain relievers, tranquilizers, and stimulants. Among nonmedical users of prescription drugs, females 12 to 17 years old are also more likely to meet abuse or dependence criteria for psychotherapeutics
National Institute on Drug Abuse (Prescription Drugs: Abuse and Addiction (Research Report Series))
Persons aged 65 years and older comprise only 13 percent of the population, yet account for more than one-third of total outpatient spending on prescription medications in the United States. Older patients are more likely to be prescribed long-term and multiple prescriptions, and some experience cognitive decline, which could lead to improper use of medications. Alternatively, those on a fixed income may abuse another person's remaining medication to save money.
National Institute on Drug Abuse (Prescription Drugs: Abuse and Addiction (Research Report Series))
Abuse of prescription drugs is highest among young adults aged 18 to 25, with 5.9 percent reporting nonmedical use in the past month (NSDUH, 2010). Among youth aged 12 to 17, 3.0 percent reported past-month nonmedical use of prescription medications. According to the 2010 MTF, prescription and OTC drugs are among the most commonly abused drugs by 12th graders, after alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco. While past-year nonmedical use of sedatives and tranquilizers decreased among 12th graders over the last 5 years, this is not the case for the nonmedical use of amphetamines or opioid pain relievers.
National Institute on Drug Abuse (Prescription Drugs: Abuse and Addiction (Research Report Series))
You could immediately see the difference between the street addicts stumbling into the clinic for help for the first time, and the patients who had been on legal prescriptions for a while. The street addicts would often stagger in with abscesses that looked like hard-boiled eggs rotting under their skin, and with open wounds on their hands and legs that looked, as Parry recalls, “like a pizza of infection. It’s mushy, and the cheese you get on it is pus. And it just gets bigger and bigger.” A combination of contaminated drugs and dirty needles had given a home to these infections in the addicts’ flesh and they “can go right through the bone and out the other side, so you’ve got a hole going right through you. You have that on both legs and your body’s not strong enough—it’ll cut right through. You had situations where people were walking and their legs snapped.” They often looked like survivors of a war, with amputated limbs and flesh that looked charred and scarred. The addicts on prescriptions, by contrast, looked like the nurses, or the receptionists, or John himself. You couldn’t tell them apart. Harry
Johann Hari (Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs)
Between 1991 and 2010, the number of prescribed stimulants increased tenfold among all ages, with prescriptions for attention-deficit-disorder drugs tripling among school-age children between 1990 and 1995 alone. “And we’re prescribing to ever- and ever-younger children, some kids as young as two years old,” said Lembke, the addiction researcher. “It’s just nuts. Because if we really believe that addiction is a result of changes in the brain due to chronic heavy drug exposure, how can we believe that stimulant exposure isn’t going to change these kids’ brains in a way that makes them more vulnerable to harder drugs?” she added.
Beth Macy (Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America)
It is possible that some people have been so mauled by life in this society that such a semi-suicide is the best alternative to real suicide for them. Curiously, a hell of a lot of M.D.s are using the same logic in relentlessly over-prescribing tranquilizers, many of which are quite habit forming (e.g., Librium) and some of which (e.g. Tofranil), are definitely linked with impotence according to psycho-pharmacologists. As Dr. Lawrence Kolb told a Congressional committee way back in 1925, “There is . . . a certain type of shrinking neurotic individual who can’t meet the demands of life, is afraid to meet people, has anxieties and fears, who if they took small amounts of narcotics – and I have examined quite a few of them – would be better and more efficient people than they would be without it.” Dr. Kolb also described two physicians who were opiate addicts and practiced successfully until they managed to “kick the habit,” after which they became hopeless problems to themselves and their families. “These two physicians that I am talking about didn’t get cured," Dr. Kolb said scornfully, “they should have had it (the drug) forever, because it (the cure) would not mean anything but an insane asylum for them, and they were doing a pretty good job of work as physicians when they were on the drug and regularly taking it.” American society has ignored Dr. Kolb’s pragmatic approach for decades and has struggled heroically to get all these lost souls off their depressant drugs. Or has it? The “war against heroin” continues; but in New York, the state has abandoned the hope of real “cure” and is satisfied just to get the junkies off an addicting drug it has made illegal – heroin – and onto an equally addicting drug it has made legal – methadone; and in the nation at large, prescriptions for central nervous system depressants are said to run into the tens of millions every year. The official attitude, by default, now appears to be, “If you can’t bear our society without being half-asleep, let us at least control which drug you choose to be half-asleep on.” This is not a formula for a non-addicted nation. It is a face-saving game to allow those bureaucrats whom William S. Burroughs calls “control addicts” to continue to believe that they are, by God, controlling everybody they want to control.
Robert Anton Wilson (Sex, Drugs & Magick – A Journey Beyond Limits)
You experience a feeling of emptiness and a yearning for something, anything, to fill up the emptiness.
Patrick Holford (How To Quit Without Feeling S**T: The fast, highly effective way to end addiction to caffeine, sugar, cigarettes, alcohol, illicit or prescription drugs)
what new innovations may come about is beyond the scope of this book, but what I’d like to suggest is that our collective addiction to consumerism is at the heart of more problems than the simply the direct impact it has had on our health and well-being. That said, health and well-being are affected by all these various issues.
V. Thomas George (Health in Flames: A Doctor’s Prescription for Living BEYOND Diet and Exercise)
He gave the students a series of “prescriptions for guaranteed misery in life,” recommending that they should be unreliable, avoid compromise, harbor resentments, seek revenge, indulge in envy, “ingest chemicals,” become addicted to alcohol, neglect to “learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others,” cling defiantly to their existing beliefs, and “stay down” when struck by the “first, second, or third severe reverse in the battle of life.
William P. Green (Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life)
If you had the chance to stop the tobacco industry before they got everyone unknowingly addicted to their products, you would, wouldn’t you? If you could have raised the alarm on the over-prescription of opioids before they destroyed the lives of other brothers and sisters, you would have, right?
Kevin Sabet
A primary factor in this shift is, as The New York Times wrote, “Mostly white and politically conservative counties have continued to send more drug offenders to prison, reflecting the changing geography of addiction. While crack cocaine addiction was centered in cities, opioid and meth addiction are ravaging small communities” in largely white locales. The “pathology” long ascribed to urban communities as integral and immutable characteristics of Black life (drug addiction, property crimes to support a habit, broken families) has now moved, with deindustrialization, into the suburbs and the countryside. By 2018, an estimated 130 people were dying every day from opioid overdoses, and over 10 million people were abusing prescription opioids.
Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together)
The reality, when the sexy advertisements have been stripped away, is that the actual product is ethanol.122 It is a horrible-tasting, addictive poison. So we sweeten it with sugar and flavoring or process it to make it more palatable. The product’s product is inebriation, a gradual deadening of your senses until you become completely intoxicated. And the side effects that are never disclosed are many. Think about ads for new medications, like Viagra or blood pressure medication. They are legally required to disclose all the statistically relevant side effects. Alcohol has the same cancer-causing effects as asbestos,123 and just three drinks per week can increase a woman’s chance of developing breast cancer by 15%,124 yet there are no labeling requirements whatsoever. Yet compared to other drugs (illegal, legal, and prescription), alcohol bears the highest harm rating.125
Annie Grace (This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life)
Instead of trotting out the usual bland platitudes about the secrets of success and happiness, he provided an inspired illustration of how to apply the principle of inversion. He gave the students a series of “prescriptions for guaranteed misery in life,” recommending that they should be unreliable, avoid compromise, harbor resentments, seek revenge, indulge in envy, “ingest chemicals,” become addicted to alcohol, neglect to “learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others,” cling defiantly to their existing beliefs, and “stay down” when struck by the “first, second, or third severe reverse in the battle of life.
William Green (Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World’s Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life)
Alcohol is a far greater killer than all opiates. You can buy alcohol on any street corner throughout the world. It gets your brain, your liver. It destroys your morals, destroys your vitality, kills the sexual potential, and you become sluggish. It was a great pity that Prohibition failed. The experiment was too radical. Instead of barring it altogether, the dispensation of alcohol should have been under prescription, or some other control. Prohibition was one of the worthiest attempts of a group to impose their will upon the rest of the people. But of course if you prohibit something you deprive people of an essential liberty; when you deny the right of choice you oppose the greatest gift in the world. People will not stand for it. Alcohol makes man mad, leads to such strange behaviourism. Yet beer and liquor ads maintain newspapers, television, some huge portion of the national and the world economy. Drinker that I am, I think essentially I am the victim of an addiction that is here in the world, revealed to all, exposed to all. It is there. We who are weak take to it and are destroyed by it, but is essentially a weakness of governments everywhere to allow this poison to circulate like a river through the bloodstream of the human race. As one of the heartiest drinkers in the world, I speak with a voice of authority.
Errol Flynn (My Wicked, Wicked Ways)
It was my norm to go to events high. I passed my driver’s exam high on weed, and I had intentionally gone to detention shrooming, just to see if I could do it without getting caught. I was determined to convince the world that every form of drug use should be legalized, determined to overthrow the authorities by proving their fickle policies futile. I was an advocate of anarchy, dead set on self-satisfaction. As a result, I went through most of high school either high, drunk, or locked up, with some sort of crumbled prescription up my nose.
Michael J Heil (Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose)
The company was selling an addictive drug that it said would not addict you as long as it was taken as prescribed. Then, when the drug did addict someone, and they began taking too much of it, or hoarding it to take all at once, or trying to obtain multiple prescriptions or early refills—then, that person was no longer taking it as prescribed. That person became one of the outcasts, an addict, and therefore the “safe when taken as prescribed” dictum remained valid.
John Temple (American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic)
i could tell that the speed was affecting my heart rate and i could only sleep for a couple of hours at the time, sometimes the only thing i ate was beer, it’d all gotten very extreme. (…) at one point i walked by a kinda scary looking homeless woman and said ‘good morning’, and she spat back ‘don’t good morning me, you got the devil in you, and i can see it’, and i lost it, because she was right, i did have a devil in me, the devil came in the form of medical grade prescription diet pills and they were controlling my mind and killing my heart. (…) and so here was my life, working out exactly the way i wanted to, and i blew it, because i couldn’t handle taking pharmaceutical grade speed daily, i just didn’t have the grit or the gumption…and i didn’t have any kind of plan or a mentor, i just figured it would work out fine (…) no one said ‘hey, this weird plan can give you permanent seizures’, i just kinda went for it.
Karen Kilgariff (Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered: The Definitive How-To Guide)
of the reward circuitry leads to a localized rebellion. If DeltaFosB is the gas pedal for bingeing, the molecule CREB functions as the brakes. CREB dampens our pleasure response.[134] It inhibits dopamine. CREB is trying to take the joy out of bingeing so that you give it a rest. Oddly enough, high levels of dopamine stimulate the production of both CREB and DeltaFosB. Our bodies are equipped with countless feedback mechanisms to keep us alive and functioning well. It makes perfect sense for mammals also to have evolved a braking system for bingeing on food or sex. There comes a time to move on and take care of the kids or maybe hunt and gather. But the glitch in the CREB/DeltaFosB balancing act is that it evolved long before humans were exposed to powerful reinforcers such as whiskey, cocaine, ice cream, or porn tube sites. All have the potential to override evolved satiation mechanisms, including CREB’s brakes. Put simply, CREB doesn’t stand much chance in the era of supernormal stimuli and widely available prescription and illicit drugs. What’s CREB to do in face of a Big Mac, fries and milkshake dinner, followed by 3-hour Mountain Dew-fuelled Call of Duty session, and two hours of surfing PornHub while smoking a joint? What array of enticements did a 19-year old hunter-gatherer encounter to goose his dopamine? Perhaps a second helping of overcooked rabbit meat or watching the four girls he’d known since birth tan hides.
Gary Wilson (Your Brain On Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction)
Some 80 percent of Americans addicted to opioids began with prescription painkillers, not with illegal street drugs. Essentially, pharmaceutical executives acted like Colombian drug lords, with legal approval. Many cities and states, including Baltimore, are now suing Purdue and other pharmaceutical companies to recover some of the costs of treating the opioid epidemic, but no one can ever give Daniel back what he lost.
Nicholas D. Kristof (Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope)
Addiction If some scientists believe that “if-then” motivators and other extrinsic rewards resemble prescription drugs that carry potentially dangerous side effects, others believe they’re more like illegal drugs that foster a deeper and more pernicious dependency. According to these scholars, cash rewards and shiny trophies can provide a delicious jolt of pleasure at first, but the feeling soon dissipates—and to keep it alive, the recipient requires ever larger and more frequent doses. The Russian economist Anton Suvorov has constructed an elaborate econometric model to demonstrate this effect, configured around what’s called “principal-agent theory.” Think of the principal as the motivator—the employer, the teacher, the parent. Think of the agent as the motivatee—the employee, the student, the child. A principal essentially tries to get the agent to do what the principal wants, while the agent balances his own interests with whatever the principal is offering. Using a blizzard of complicated equations that test a variety of scenarios between principal and agent, Suvorov has reached conclusions that make intuitive sense to any parent who’s tried to get her kids to empty the garbage. By offering a reward, a principal signals to the agent that the task is undesirable. (If the task were desirable, the agent wouldn’t need a prod.) But that initial signal, and the reward that goes with it, forces the principal onto a path that’s difficult to leave. Offer too small a reward and the agent won’t comply. But offer a reward that’s enticing enough to get the agent to act the first time, and the principal “is doomed to give it again in the second.” There’s no going back. Pay your son to take out the trash—and you’ve pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free. What’s more, once the initial money buzz tapers off, you’ll likely have to increase the payment to continue compliance. As Suvorov explains, “Rewards are addictive in that once offered, a contingent reward makes an agent expect it whenever a similar task is faced, which in turn compels the principal to use rewards over and over again.” And before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice. It will quickly feel less like a bonus and more like the status quo—which then forces the principal to offer larger rewards to achieve the same effect.
Daniel H. Pink (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us)
Ohio was an apt forum for this showdown. By 2016, 2.3 million people in the state—approximately 20 percent of the total population—received a prescription for opioids. Half of the children who were in foster care across the state had opioid-addicted parents.
Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)
Overdoses had now surpassed car accidents to become the leading cause of preventable death in America. In a midyear update to the Sacklers in June 2016, staffers told the family that, according to surveys, nearly half of all Americans knew someone who had been addicted to prescription opioids.
Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)
Natural Ways to Help Anxiety Don’t start something you may not be able to stop. After the pandemic, anxiety disorders more than doubled in children and teenagers.[1] Prescriptions for antianxiety medications, such as benzodiazepines like alprazolam (Xanax) and clonazepam (Klonopin) dramatically increased. The problem is that they are addictive, and once you start them they are often very hard to stop. Here are 11 strategies to consider before going on antianxiety medications. 1. Check for hypoglycemia, anemia, and hyperthyroidism. 2. Try an elimination diet for three weeks. (See day 257 for more detail.) 3. Practice meditation and hypnosis daily (research shows they can both calm stress and anxiety). 4. Try heart rate variability (HRV) training (anxiety is linked to low levels of HRV, but you can hack your way to a healthier HRV with biofeedback apps such as Welltory). See day 202 for more information. 5. Practice diaphragmatic breathing—deep breathing from your belly—when you feel anxious. 6. Eliminate the ANTs (automatic negative thoughts). See days 22, 116–117. 7. Incorporate a calming exercise, such as yoga or qi gong, into your week. 8. Take 200–400 mg of L-Theanine per day. 9. Take 500–1,500 mg of GABA per day. 10. Take 100–500 mg of magnesium glycinate, citrate, or malate with 30 mg of vitamin B6 per day. 11. Schedule neurofeedback to help retrain your brain. Anxiety disorders are very painful, but too often people reach for marijuana, alcohol, or prescribed benzodiazepines, which can be of short-term benefit but cause long-term problems with addiction and memory issues. If the above interventions are ineffective or only partly effective with my patients, I’ll try other nutraceuticals or medications targeted to a specific type of anxiety (take the test at brainhealthassessment.com).
Amen MD Daniel G (Change Your Brain Every Day: Simple Daily Practices to Strengthen Your Mind, Memory, Moods, Focus, Energy, Habits, and Relationships)
Every 19 minutes, someone dies from a prescription painkiller overdose. In fact, the number of painkiller overdose deaths now exceeds the number of deaths from heroin and cocaine combined.
Taite Adams (Opiate Addiction - The Painkiller Addiction Epidemic, Heroin Addiction and the Way Out)
The indispensable foundation of a rational stance toward drug addiction would be the decriminalization of all substance dependence and the provision of such substances to confirmed users under safely controlled conditions. It’s important to note that decriminalization does not mean legalization. Legalization would make manufacturing and selling drugs legal, acceptable commercial activities. Decriminalization refers only to removing from the penal code the possession of drugs for personal use. It would create the possibility of medically supervised dispensing when necessary. The fear that easier access to drugs would fuel addiction is unfounded: drugs, we have seen, are not the cause of addiction. Despite the fact that cannabis is openly available in Holland, for instance, Dutch per-capita use of marijuana is half that in the United States. And no one is advocating the open availability of hard drugs. Decriminalization also does not mean that addicts will be able to walk into any pharmacy to get a prescription of cocaine. Their drugs of dependence should be dispensed under public authority and under medical supervision, in pure form, not adulterated by unscrupulous dealers. Addicts also ought to be offered the information, the facilities and the instruments they need to use drugs as safely as possible. The health benefits of such an approach are self-evident: greatly reduced risk of infection and disease transmission, much less risk of overdose and, very importantly, comfortable and regular access to medical care. Not having to spend exorbitant amounts on drugs that, in themselves, are inexpensive to prepare, addicts would not be forced into crime, violence, prostitution or poverty to pay for their habits. They would not have to decide between eating or drug use, or to scrounge for food in garbage cans or pick cigarette butts out of sidewalk puddles. They would no longer need to suffer malnutrition.
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
played than at rest. Both cocaine and Ritalin work in the basal ganglia. Side note: the reason cocaine is highly addictive and prescription stimulants like Ritalin tend not to be is related to how each drug is metabolized. Cocaine has a powerful, immediate effect that stimulates an enormous release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. The pleasure this brings rapidly fades, leaving the desire for more. Ritalin, and other stimulants like Adderall, on the other hand, work more slowly, inducing no high or pleasure in most people and the effects stay around for a longer time. Similarly, video games bring pleasure and focus by increasing dopamine release. The problem with them is that the more dopamine is released, the less neurotransmitter is available later on to do schoolwork, homework, chores, and so on.
Daniel G. Amen (Healing ADD: The Breakthrough Program that Allows You to See and Heal the 7 Types of ADD)
only 4 percent of persons misusing or addicted to prescription drugs reports getting them from a drug dealer or a stranger.
Anna Lembke (Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop)
Dollars to donuts you’re looking at ODs there,” said Kemper, pointing to some young people getting out of cars and heading to one of the gravesites. “Over eighty thousand people in America this year alone,” she added. “More than died in Vietnam and the wars in the Middle East combined. And far more than die in traffic accidents or by guns, and it’s only getting worse. Next year we’ll probably be looking at over a hundred thousand dead. The opioid crisis is actually responsible for the life expectancy in this country starting to go down. Can you wrap your head around that? Nearly a half million dead since 2000. Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans under age fifty. We had a recent study done at DEA. Life insurance companies value a human life at about five million bucks. Using that number and other factors, our people projected the economic loss to the country each year due to the opioid crisis at about a hundred billion dollars. A third of the population is on medication for pain. And they’re not getting addicted on street corners. They’re getting addicted at their doctors’ offices.” “From prescription painkillers.
David Baldacci (The Fallen (Amos Decker, #4))