Thereโs a lot of buzz at drug treatment centers in Savannah GA โ but not the kind youโre thinking about. If youโve spent too much time looking for drugs in all the wrong places, then itโs time to look for the truth about opiates. Most people have no idea whatโs true or false about opiates.
What Do You Really Know About Pain Pills?
There are so many statistics out there about pain pill addiction that itโs hard to know the truth. Even the best drug treatment centers in Savannah, GA, may have trouble sifting through all the numbers and giving you exact figures. First weโre gonna bust some myths, and then weโll give you some numbers to think about.
Popular Myths at Drug Treatment Centers in Savannah, GA
People are easily fooled about drugs, but thereโs no shame in that. Pills are sold by the drug companies in magazines, on television, over the Internet, and theyโre woven throughout just about all aspects of our national culture. Got a headache? Take a pill. Theyโre accessible, theyโre cheap, and if you get them from your doctor then they must be harmless. These are the myths that most people believe.
Myth: The More Pills, the Quicker Youโll Get Better
Most people take their first opiate drugs because they are experiencing some kind of pain. It might be short-term pain from twisting your back, or maybe itโs long-term misery from something like arthritis. People think that if one pill makes gets them back on their feet even with that wrenched knee, just think how much they can get done or how much better theyโll feel if they take two.
The truth, as you can learn at one of the opiate drug treatment centers in Savannah, GA, is that opiate pain medications gradually desensitize your nerve pathways. If you keep taking those pills, and even worse if you double them up, you will no longer benefit from them because your brain develops a tolerance for them. Then you may notice that your knee feels better but your stomach or your head hurts. Pain pills over time can cause migraines, and they also slow down the digestive system so that constipation with its related pains can overtake your system.
Myth: They Wonโt Hurt You If the Doctor Prescribed Them
How can you turn down medication that is just what the doctor ordered? After all, if you donโt take that pain medication, youโll be lying around in bed, unable to function from the pain. The doctor wrote that prescription because he knows it will relieve the inflammation and help you get back to normal quickly. After all, your doctor wouldnโt give you something that was harmful.
The counselors and doctors at the opiate drug treatment centers in Savannah, GA, can tell you about all kinds of people who took what the doctor ordered and quickly succumbed to addiction. Whether or not you become addicted has nothing to do with your doctorโs good intention and everything to do with the addictive potential of pain pills. A decade ago, the drug companies spent a good bit of money convincing the doctors that their medications werenโt addictive. Itโs difficult to blame the thousands of doctors out there who think that pain pills formulated with crush-resistant coatings are entirely non-addictive. They know nothing about the people who have to seek help at drug treatment centers in Savannah, GA. They know nothing about the poison theyโre dispensing. Even so, there are frightening numbers of doctors who write prescriptions for pain pills solely to satisfy their patientsโ demands.
Insurance companies like Anthem and pharmacies like CVS have both engaged in studies to pinpoint problem prescribers. Anthem operates a pain management portal on its website that tells us, on average, 60 American men die each day from opioid overdose, and so do 40 women. It says that over a quarter billion prescriptions for opioid pain pills were written in in 2012, enough to medicate every American adult. CVS checks its lists of prescribing physicians, and it has actually banned certain physiciansโ prescriptions from being filled at its pharmacies.
Hereโs yet another aspect of the same mythโif the doctor prescribes it, he knows you canโt get addicted. Well, not everybody is susceptible to the same potential for addiction. If a doctor is going to prescribe pain pills, he should question the patient closely about family histories of addiction. The facts are pointing toward heredity of addiction, as experts at the opiate drug treatment centers in Savannah, GA, can tell you. Itโs why some people go through life blithely unaware of the struggles endured by the others caught up in the dangerous web of opiate dependence.
Myth: Pain Pills Coated With Tamper-Proof Coatings Are Safe
We mentioned this fallacy earlier, but it bears some focus. Opiate pain pills coated with tamper-resistant formulations are even more dangerous than the regular kind. People at the helms of pharmaceutical companies tell family doctors from the shores of Georgia to California that tamper-resistant coatings on opiate pain medications render their medications safe for all. After all, they get big paychecksโthe president of the company that manufactures Vicodin took home $22,006,271 in 2014. Wouldnโt that pay for a lot of rehab!
But just ask anybody on a street cornerโyou know who we meanโand theyโll tell you how to get rid of that coating. Then the drug becomes all the more dangerous, because instead of getting a little bit of a time-released medication at a time, the addict ingests the whole dose at once. Thatโs a trip to the E.R.โor the morgueโif we ever saw one.
Crush These StatisticsโOr Be Crushed By Them
We promised you some eye-opening statistics, and so here they come:
- Youโre just dabbling with opiate pain medication, and you have no intention of becoming addicted. But the National Institute on Drug Abuse tells us that one of every 15 people who use pain pills without a prescription will turn to heroin within ten years.
- Almost 9 million Americans abused prescription drugs in statistics available from 2010. Of those, 1.1 million abused stimulants such as ADHD medications, 2.2 million abused tranquilizers like Xanax, and a startling 5.1 million Americans abused opiate pain pills. And prescription pain pill use has just increased in the past five years.
- The people of the United States make up only 5 percent of the total world population. However, they take three-quarters of all the prescription drugs in the world.
Abstinence-free rehab doesnโt offer much hope for most people addicted to opiates. No matter how hard they try, their urges to go back to their drug of choice are too overwhelming to resist. SAMHSA, the federal governmentโs Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, has been spreading the word that in order to get clean and stay clean, the best way is methadone treatment at opiate drug treatment centers. Savannah, GA offers some wonderful programs. If youโre tired of being the dog who pays the salaries of the drug company kingsโand the drug cartel kingpinsโthen make up your mind to change your life. Get some help now.
