Prescription Sharing Among Loved Ones Growing Into Trend
Dec 25, 2006
By: Joe Cantlupe
Copley News Service
Not back-alley drug dealers. Not Internet pharmacies. Not doctors.
It’s your Aunt Betsy.
Friends and family are becoming key suppliers of prescription drugs to patients, say government officials, who are preparing major educational campaigns to stem what they call a significant problem.
Officials say the sharing of the prescription drugs, which are painkillers and stimulants, have the potential for bad drug interactions and abuse by patients.
What has shaken up drug education officials at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration are the little-publicized findings of a nationwide report issued this year.
The National Survey on Drug Use and Health report showed that nearly 60 percent of 67,500 respondents over a one-year period, ending in 2005, said they got their most recent prescription medication from friends or family. Most of the recipients were young people, officials said.
“There’s a culture of dosing going on – people looking for the magic pills,” David Murray, chief scientist at the White House office, said in a recent interview. “We need to change the culture of acceptability of mixing and matching. It’s a little bit of a stunner.”
“We talk about Oxycontin abuse and Mexican gangs dealing drugs, but we don’t mention family or friends,” Murray said.
Physicians, pharmacists and drug educators say there are endless tales across the American landscape about people complaining of pain or illness and, instead of visiting a doctor, relying on medication from personal acquaintances.
“People do share their medication,” said Daniel Zlott, a San Francisco-based pharmacist and a spokesman for the American Pharmaceutical Association. “They have some leftover medication for a neighbor who has a lower-back problem, and Advil just isn’t doing it. They say, ‘Oh, I’m sick. I remember my brother had something.’ ”
Zlott said he knows of several instances in which patients relied on prescription drugs from family members and the results were nearly tragic. The medication reacted with other drugs they were taking, he said.
Pharmaceutical abuse has been a growing problem in recent years, particularly among the young.
According to a Department of Health and Human Services survey on drug use and health in 2005, 32.7 million people – or 13.4 percent of the population – used prescription pain relievers nonmedically at least once in their lifetime. Hundreds of thousands of people ended up going to hospital emergency rooms because of overdoses and related problems, officials said.
Pain relievers are the most commonly abused drugs, among them Vicodin, Percocet and Oxycontin. They represent 75 percent of drugs used for nonmedical purposes for the past year.
Many of the methods for illicitly obtaining prescription drugs have been well documented and the target of intensive investigations. They include doctor shopping, in which patients go from physician to physician to obtain drugs; online pharmacies; theft; burglary; and drug dealing.
But the latest surveys show that those problems pale in comparison to people improperly obtaining drugs from family or friends, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services officials said.
H. Westley Clark, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment at the services agency, said officials are trying to determine the “magnitude of the problem” related to prescription drug sharing – in some cases, stealing – among family and friends.
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