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

much THC can also increase the risk of mental illness. Too many people are ending up in the ER for THC-induced intoxication and panic attacks. Unregulated THC-infused products pose an even bigger danger for those at risk of serious mental disorders. A recent study published in the British journal
Psychiatry
showed that large doses of THC can trigger schizophrenia in predisposed patients. 
    Finally, isn’t it obvious to all concerned that edibles such as brownies, cookies, and candy infused with mega doses of THC pose still another danger to children? We regulate alcohol andcigarettes, which like marijuana are legalized recreational drugs intended for adult use, with standardized dosages and packaging. Why not, then, marijuana? 
    8.Heroin Is Mainly a Ghetto Drug
    A comprehensive study called, appropriately, “The Changing Face of Heroin Use in the United States,” published in 2014 by the journal
JAMA Psychiatry,
reported that contrary to popular belief, most heroin addicts today did not start on their “silk road” to perdition with another illicit drug, such as marijuana. Instead, most first started getting high with prescription painkillers, likely obtained at home, from a friend, or illegally on the street.
    As mentioned earlier, the campaign to restrict prescription painkillers simply switched the addiction problem in the United States to heroin, which, unfortunately, at the same time was becoming cheap and plentiful on the black market due to overproduction in the narcotic countries, notably Afghanistan but also Mexico and countries in South America and southeast and southwest Asia.
    Quite suddenly, the new prescription painkiller epidemic transformed into the new heroin epidemic. As
The Atlantic
magazine noted in an October 2014 article, “ten years after prescription painkiller dependence” swept America and “the government cracked down on doctors and drug companies, people went searching for a cheaper, more accessible high. Now, many areas are struggling with an unprecedented heroin crisis.”
    Heroin, the drug that was once exclusively associated withurban America and particularly black ghettos, was now becoming a fixture in white suburbia and in rural states. The problem became so alarming that in Vermont, everyone’s ideal of pastoral beauty in America (not to mention the headquarters of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream), the governor devoted his entire annual speech in 2014 to what he called “a full-blown heroin crisis” gripping his state.
    In a 2014 article headlined “Heroin Overdose Deaths Quadruple over Last Decade, As Painkillers Open Fatal Gateway,” the website Medical Daily reported that the death rate jumped from 0.7 deaths per 100,000 people in the year 2000 to 2.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2013. More troubling, between 2010 and 2013, the death rate made even greater leaps: from a 6 percent increase over the previous decade to 37 percent. “Beneath this trend lurks a more fundamental change in how heroin is used, and, importantly, who is using it. The demographics of fatal overdose have changed considerably in the last decade. In 2000, black adults between forty-five and sixty-four years old showed the highest rate, at two deaths per 100,000. In 2013, white adults between eighteen and forty-four earned that distinction, at seven deaths per 100,000. Some suggest heroin’s vanishing stigma can explain the change,” according to the report.
    Fueling the epidemic was a new, more pure and potent form of heroin that could be snorted or smoked to achieve the high previously possible only through injections. So, while we’re at it, let’s destroy the other myth about opioids as largely a drug of choice of young people. As it turns out, prescription pill addiction skews much older than other drug epidemics. In 2012, those between the ages of forty-five and sixty-four accounted for thehighest rate of inpatient hospital stays for opioid