Every year it seems, every month or week even, we seem to hear something terrible happening in the news or in our communities that has to do with drug and alcohol abuse.
The use and abuse of stimulant, pharmaceutical drugs are on the rise amongst American teens and young adults. These are drugs like Ritalin, Concerta, and Adderall, pharmaceuticals designed to treat ADD, ADHD, OCD, etc.
In recent news, the mayor of San Francisco, California, Mrs. London Breed, has attempted to implement the use of safe injection sites, a controversial resolution method that is still considered very unpopular and illegal in the United States.
When prescription drug abuse really began to take off in the U.S., causing unprecedented damage, death, crisis, misery, and economic turmoil, many Americans chose to blame the pharmaceutical companies which made the drugs. And this was the right place to lay the blame, or at least most of it.
New research shows that the online sale of drugs is a new threat to the nation. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the “Dark Web” as it is called is now responsible for more than five billion dollars in drug sales every year.
The demographics of drug addiction and substance abuse in the United States is shifting. The mortality rate of white males is skyrocketing in the U.S. as pertains to drug use, while the mortality rate for minorities is either staying the same or dropping.
As the U.S. drug problem continues to grow and become more serious, our nation invents newer and more desperate methods of addressing such problems. A very “popular” approach to drug addiction treatment has been Medication-Assisted Therapy.
The amazing tool that is science has done so much for us. Science has helped and continues to help us learn more about things, it helps us improve our quality of living and longevity of life, it helps us take more responsibility for our planet and our condition, etc.
We’ve heard a lot of crazy-sounding things in the news lately, but a recently resurfaced research report that discusses how marijuana use might actually increase one’s odds of having a stroke is a new one.
If we lived in a world where fewer people died from drug overdoses, that would be a better world indeed. We can strive to make that world a reality by getting trained on not only how to prevent overdoses, but on how to spot overdoses when they do occur, and then on how to respond to them.