Pills Prescription Becoming Drug
Pills becoming the new marijuana.
The prescription drugs allegedly found in Al Gore III’s possession Wednesday are favorites among young people, according to drug abuse experts, who say prescription drugs may soon overtake street drugs in popularity.“I wouldn’t be surprised if right now at this point in time, there are more kids abusing prescription drugs than abusing marijuana,” said Joseph A. Califano Jr., chairman and president of CASA, the National Center on Alcohol and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Gore was arrested on charges of possessing — in addition to marijuana — Vicodin, Xanax, Valium and Adderall.
According to a CASA report, between 1993 and 2005 the proportion of college students abusing Vicodin and other opiods went up 343 percent, about 240,000 individuals. The numbers increased 450 percent, or by 170,000 students, for tranquilizers such as Xanax and Valium, and 93 percent, or 225,000 students, for stimulants, including Adderall.
Prescription drug abuse is particularly common among upper middle class students, according to Lisa Jack, a clinical psychologist at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“It just goes to show that where you’re from doesn’t matter,” Jack said.
And young people don’t have to go far to get these drugs. “Prescription drugs are very easy for kids to get,” Califano said. “They can get them from the Internet. They can get them from their parents’ medicine cabinets. They can get them from their friends.”
He said often students get them from friends who were prescribed these drugs legitimately.
“Kids sell them to each other,” Jack said. “Drug trading happens all the time.”
Experts say it’s particularly a problem with Adderall, a drug prescribed legitimately to millions of young people with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
According to CASA, more than a third of children ages 11-18 in Wisconsin and Minnesota who’d been prescribed Adderall and other ADHD medications reported being approached to sell or trade their drugs.
And often they say yes, according to one Canadian study that found one out of four teens who’d been legitimately prescribed Ritalin gave or sold some of their drugs.
Another appeal to prescription drugs, besides the easy access, is that young people often perceive them as safer.
“They don’t have to go to the streets and deal with some guy they don’t know and get marijuana where they don’t know what’s in it,” Califano said. “Also, they see their parents using these drugs, so they seem safe.”
Jack said prescription drugs can be more challenging to treat than addiction to street drugs. “In traditional drug abuse, addicts can say, ‘I’ve been using meth or coke or pot,’ and an addiction specialist knows what to do,” she said. But with prescription drugs, “sometimes the kids don’t even know what they’ve been taking. They just pass the pills around.”
Part of the solution would be for drug makers to formulate their products so they’re harder to abuse, said Califano, adding that anti-drug campaigns also should focus more on prescription drug abuse.
Parents need to do their part as well, he said. “When I was a kid in Brooklyn, when parents had liquor, they locked up the liquor cabinet,” he said. “Maybe parents need to lock up the medicine cabinet.”
Scientists predict brave new world of brain pills
Can’t remember phone numbers, worried about an upcoming exam or desperately want to give up smoking? In future, the answer will be simple: just pop a pill.
The idea that an array of easily available and addiction-free drugs could be used to improve memory or increase intelligence is the stuff of science fiction dystopia - in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley created a whole planet under the spell of a pleasure drug called Soma.
But a new report by leading scientists in the fields of psychology and neuroscience argues that, very soon, there really will be a pill for every ill.
“It is possible that [advances] could usher in a new era of drug use without addiction,” said the report by Foresight, the government’s science-based thinktank.
“In a world that is increasingly non-stop and competitive, the individual’s use of such substances may move from the fringe to the norm.”
However, the report said the widespread adoption of new brain-enhancing drugs was not without risks and would raise “significant ethical, social and practical issues.”
Drugs that work on the brain are already common - many people can hardly begin their days without the mind-sharpening effects of caffeine or nicotine.
Launching the report yesterday, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, said that brain-enhancing drugs developed to treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s were likely to find increased use among healthy people looking to improve their perception, memory, planning or judgment.
Ritalin, prescribed to children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is sometimes used by healthy people to enhance their mental performance. Modafinil, a drug developed to treat narcolepsy, has been shown to reduce impulsiveness and help people focus on problems.
“It improves working memory - your ability to remember telephone numbers - it gives you an extra digit or two,” said Trevor Robbins, an experimental psychologist at Cambridge University and an author of the Foresight report.
“It also improves your planning when you’re doing complex, chess-like problems. It makes you more reflective about a problem: you take a bit longer but you get it right.”
Modafinil has already been used by the US military to keep soldiers awake and alert and some scientists are considering its usefulness in helping shift workers deal with erratic working hours. It has also been tested for cocaine users. “It produces some of the subjective effects of cocaine without the chronic dependence,” said Prof Robbins. Other drugs are being touted as “vaccinations” against substances such as nicotine, alcohol and cocaine. The treatment would work by causing the immune system to produce antibodies against the drug being abused - these antibodies would render the drug impotent when taken and prevent it from having any effect on the brain.
“How [the vaccinations are] used depends on clinical judgments,” said Prof Robbins. “Informed consent is important.”
But he cautioned against any plan to pre-vaccinate people against narcotics. “One would be very careful indeed about trying to sign one’s children up for such treatment,” he said. “That, to me, sounds reprehensible.”
In the long term, drugs that can delete painful memories could also be used routinely. “We are now looking 20-25 years ahead,” said Prof Robbins. “Very basic science is showing that it is possible to call up a memory, knock it on the head and produce selective amnesia.”
That has obvious uses for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but there is also the tantalising possibility that it could be used to treat harmful addictions.
“Drug addiction can be understood very much as an aberrant learning process,” said Prof Robbins.
“Many of these drugs hijack the learning processes of the brain and produce aberrant habits, which dominate behaviour.
“Clearly the possibility exists that you can call up a drugrelated memory and produce amnesia for it, thus removing craving for that particular drug.”
As drug research improves, the harmful effects of today’s recreational drugs could even be engineered out.
“It may be that one could design out the harmful effects of existing drugs,” said Professor Gerry Stimson of Imperial College. “So, alcohol analogues, drugs which produce similar effects to alcohol without some of the side-effects.”
Society must decide how to use the new drugs, the scientists said.
For example, if drugs to improve exam performance become widespread, schoolchildren might find themselves being tested for drugs before exams, they suggested.
“It’s a new twist on drug-testing,” said Prof Stimson. “Is it a fair advantage or an unfair advantage?”
On the menu: range of treatments
· Ritalin (methylphenidate) is used by a small number of students in an attempt to improve exam results and by business people to improve performance in the boardroom
· D-amphetamine also improves memory but only for people of a certain genetic make-up
· Rimonabant is used as an antidote to the intoxicant effects of cannabis and a treatment for heroin relapse. But it is sometimes also used to enhance the high produced by these drugs by reducing their side-effects
· Naltrexone is already used to treat chronic alcoholism and narcotic abuse. It works by blocking the pleasure receptors that are normally activated in the brain when people use the drugs
· Propranolol, a beta-blocker, is used to treat high blood pressure, angina, and abnormal heart rhythms. It is also used sometimes by snooker players to calm their nerves
· Modafinil, a stimulant developed to treat narcolepsy, has been used by soldiers to improve memory and judgment. It is also used in treatment of cocaine addiction
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