The Anatomy of Addiction by MD Akikur Mohammad Read Free Book Online Page A

took hold in the late 1990s the worst of its kind in U.S. history. “The bottom line is that this is one of the few health problems in this country that’s getting worse,” CDC director Tom Frieden told the
Huffington Post
in 2014.
    Echoing those sentiments, the editorial board of
USA Today
wrote in November 2013, “The deadliest drug problem in America is not heroin or cocaine or even crack cocaine. It’s the abuse of perfectly legal prescription pain medications—familiar names such as Vicodin and Lortab and generic hydrocodone.”
    The extent of the prescription pill problem is reflected in this startling statistic: The painkiller hydrocodone is the most prescribed medication in America—136.7 million prescriptions a year at last count. To frame the problem another way, in 2010, enough prescription painkillers were prescribed to medicate every American adult every four hours for one month.
    In 2014 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) began a joint effort to crack down on the prescription pill epidemic by reclassifying hydrocodone, Vicodin, and other leading painkillers in the category reserved for medical substances with the highest potential forharm. The initiative also required patients to present to a pharmacist in person with a written prescription from a qualified health provider—a move to stem the practice of faxing or calling in the prescription multiple times to multiple pharmacies.
    The good news is that all of that worked. The tidal wave of prescription pills available on the legal and illegal markets began to recede. The bad news is that pill addicts switched their drug of choice to an equally dangerous drug—heroin.
    7.Today’s Marijuana Is Extremely Powerful and a Leading Cause of Drug Overdose, thus Possession in Small Amounts Shouldn’t Be Decriminalized or Legalized
    I could write a book about marijuana myths alone, but I’ll confine myself to two points. First, even today with some states legalizing marijuana for personal recreational use, there has not been one recorded death from marijuana overdose. While tens of thousands of people die each year from alcohol or prescription painkillers, no one has ever died or overdosed on marijuana. Why? Let me quote the National Cancer Institute: “Because cannabinoid receptors, unlike opioid receptors, are not located in the brainstem areas controlling respiration, lethal overdoses from Cannabis and cannabinoids [marijuana] do not occur.”
    Although painkillers can cause a person to stop breathing, you could smoke or ingest marijuana all day and all night and your respiration would still not be affected because marijuana does not affect the body’s brain pathway that controls it.
    Second, there is no evidence that decriminalizing, legalizing,or otherwise making marijuana more available to the public in any way increases its use. In fact, according to a recent national school-based survey among teens in grades eight through twelve, the increased availability of marijuana in the twenty-one states that legalized medical marijuana did not significantly change its use. The study was conducted by researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and supports a growing body of evidence that making legalized marijuana more available to the public does not increase its use.
    All this said, I still support the regulation of marijuana. At the moment, there are no federal standards regarding dosages. The problem of nonstandardized packaging—including the lack of clear warning labels—is particularly egregious with marijuana-infused edibles as well as drinks and pills. Unlike smoking a joint, the user can consume a relatively large quantity of THC, the high-inducing compound in marijuana, by eating a cookie, for example. This can impair the user’s cognitive and motor skills, a potentially fatal scenario if it involves driving a car.
    Ingesting too