Look At What Was Written In My Henry Ford Health System Newsletter #2

[Ms Chocolate]

Prescription Painkillers Could Be New 'Gateway' Drugs

 

Detox patients hooked on street drugs often addicted to legal meds first, study found

 

FRIDAY, Aug. 27 (HealthDay News) -- Prescription medicines are the way that many drug addicts first get hooked, making these legal medicines the new "gateway" drugs, new study findings show.

 

University at Buffalo researchers interviewed 75 patients hospitalized for opioid detoxification and found that 31 of them said they first became addicted to legitimately prescribed painkillers.

 

Another 24 patients said their addiction began when they used a friend's left-over prescription pills or stole drugs from a parent's medicine cabinet, while the remaining 20 patients said they got hooked on street drugs.

 

But the study found that 92 percent of the patients said they eventually bought illegal drugs (usually heroin) because street drugs are less expensive and more effective than prescription drugs. Their reasons for continuing to use drugs included to feel "normal," to feel "like a better person" or to ease emotional pain and stress.

 

"We are seeing an increase in the number of patients addicted to prescription drugs, so we wanted to better understand how they first got hooked," study senior author Dr. Richard Blondell, a professor of family medicine, said in a University at Buffalo news release.

"This information suggests that there is a progressive nature to opioid use, and that prescription opioids can be the gateway to illicit drug addiction. It also tells us that people who use prescriptions illegally may be at greater risk for subsequent heroin use than those who use prescriptions legally."

 

The study was published recently in the Journal of Addiction Medicine.

 

More information

The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse has more about drug abuse and addiction.

 

 

[peanutbutter]

1800 people die every year from the side effects of prescription opiates and other pain killers.

 

The cost to our medical system, in Michigan alone, is more that five hundred million dollars every year.

 

Every one of us pays money for our governments policies against marijuana.

 

We pay through our insurance payments and our taxes.

[michiganfootballisawesome]

And marijuana isn't a gateway drug at all... seems like this should prove that it's time to start focusing more on people using illegal drugs and less on those of us medicating with marijuana.

[Century Gardens]

And marijuana isn't a gateway drug at all... seems like this should prove that it's time to start focusing more on people using illegal drugs and less on those of us medicating with marijuana.

 

Marijuana has had 30 years to gateway me to other drugs. It hasn't happened yet. Maybe it's just a matter of time? Maybe I'll be shooting smack in my retirement home.

 

The 'gateway' implication is utterly ridiculous.

[Leon]

If marijuana is a gateway to cocaine, then milk is a gateway to alcohol! Better kill th cows and start arresting dairy farmers!

[Phil78]

i had posted a quote from a study done, shown on justsaynow's facebook updates, that showed ethnicity/race and the environment you are living in (ghetto vs high society) are bigger indicators of drug choice and use, than whether someone has smoked marijuana. very few people have smoked mj, that hadn't first drank alcohol (i, actually smoked mj before i had drank alcohol, but still...)

 

if mj is a gateway drug, it is by design of the government and their BS. i know i, personally, was questioning what i had heard all my life up until that point, and that it was 5% of what they claimed. i thought i'd be seeing things and in a totally different world.

 

so, if they lied about mj, cocaine and heroin couldn't be that bad, either, right? i never went any further than mj, and then shrooms every once in a while, but now i'm questioning why i didn't go another step further..... it's a gateway drug, shouldn't i be smoking crack and meth by now? i mean, it's already been 20 years, what am i waiting for?

 

what they're seeing, is their world of sh*t coming tumbling down, as americans are wising up to their BS