Yesterday I read that the Province of Alberta has four times the amount of prescriptions drug abuse as Quebec. They don't know why.
I can hazard a guess...:)
When I was in my 20's I had a close friend who was hooked on some prescription pain killer. She had an important job and few noticed she was in la la land most of the time.
Can't recall which drug it was. A powerful one. She had multiple prescriptions and one day she overdosed and I had to bring her to emergency where they let her writhe in pain on her gurney for hours.
I had an inkling they were doing this on purpose, but maybe not. I vividly recall that day I spent in ER because I wasn't sick, so I got to watch all the human drama unfolding around, and that day ER I recall was like an episode of ER the TV show, I tell you.
A man died and his two kids (youths) were reacting in opposite ways:the daughter wailing and the son with his head in a textbook.
I heard a doctor tell another that the same man had presented the day before with a paralyzed finger and they had sent him home... and then he presented again.... anyway, it sounded like the doctor was describing how his case had been mismanaged, like Mrs. Haufnagel on St. Elsewhere.
Anyway, I took a Tylenol blue pill yesterday, just one, to see if it helped my blocked ears, which are acting up. I'm using a homeopathic remedy.. I don't like taking drugs of any kind. (Except the one that pours from a bottle and comes from grapes.)
I am clearly a rarity today. And the modern doctor loves to give pills. (A recent Salon.com article claimed that in the old days doctors did everything they could not to give a pill, now they do the opposite. No time. Easier. They really are "pill pushers.")
When my husband goes for a checkup, his doctor now always offers him Viagra, just out of the blue. My husband is totally healthy, but he is asked if he wants this 'recreational' drug, so the doctor must ask all the older guys. (Last time I told my husband to say that he didn't need Viagra, but he could sure use Angelina Jolie. Viagra is not an aphrodesiac, as far as I know, but it is treated as one. Ps. and the ads say that 40 percent of men over a certain age have this condition on occasion. Then it isn't a condition, is it? It's normal.
The same goes for Prozac. If a huge proportion of the population is depressed (and the prescribing statistics for these anti-depression drugs seem to suggest it is.. One fifth of the population of Glasgow is on some sort of anti-depressant apparently) then depression is normal - especially in Scots.. So these drugs are merely mood enhancers. The same Salon article says that depression in now something to be 'managed' and not be 'cured'. Managing makes more money than curing, you see. Almost 9 percent of Americans are on the drugs,and the figure is ever rising, but not African Americans, oddly, who have something to be sad about if the recent NYT article, saying that MLK is weeping in his grave is true.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/opinion/martin-luther-king-jr-would-want-a-revolution-not-a-memorial.htm
(But managing your mood with marijuana is bad, very bad. Well, were it legal, it couldn't make money for Big Pharma, so better that it make money for Big Crime, and provide an excuse to abritrarily incarcerate certain racial groups. That's the logic anyway.)
They don't talk about this on the News, because were it not for advertising from Big Pharma, the mainstream media would be dead as nail in door. An awful lot has changed since they allowed Pharmaceutical Companies to sell directly to civilians and not just to doctors. And the way the announcers race through the list of possible side effects at the end of these drug ads, makes it sound funny, like a joke. Indeed, the side effect of Viagra have reached iconic joke status in TV sitcoms and movies.
The prescription drugs Alberta's citizens are abusing are opiods. Probably akin to the drugs found in 'tonics' in 1900.
I am writing Edith's Story, the follow up to Threshold Girl www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf
and I have her stoned on some tonic as she goes to the Art Show.
I know for a fact her principal, who was also medical doctor, gave her tonics for 'heart' conditions. So he probably really dosed her here after the death of her fiance. And there were always those medicines for La Grippe.
So has it really changed that much? People in those days, women mostly, were going out stoned too. (It's only coincidental that she was a Canadian Scot.) They were just outlawing opiates in every day products.. In the US, especially, which is why the Patent Medicine People all moved to Brockville, Ontario.
I read an ad for a baby medicine that proudly claimed Contains no Opiates. Imagine.
Of course they famously sedated housewives in the 50's with Valium.
