Prescription drug deaths

All of the above.

I wonder how many traffic deaths are actually due to prescription and over-the-counter drugs? I know that as a truck driver, there are a number of drugs I am not allowed to take, such as ambien.

I agree with all of the above, but I'd rank them in this order: drug companies, medical profession (doctors and pharmacists) then the consumer.

I don't think that drug companies clearly understand the risks of drug interactions, nor the real effect on humans. They can test all they want, but there will always be things they don't uncover during the drugs development. Add that to the need to turn a profit, I think that some dangerous drugs are in the marketplace.

I've known quite a few people that have had either serious drug interaction reactions from mixing drugs prescribed by doctors. Doctors don't always understand what they are prescribing. Pharmacies don't always document all of the medication a person is taking. Add that to the drug company issues, and people will die. I'm allergic to most antibiotics, and whenever a doctor prescribes something new for me, I actually beg them to hospitalize me to ensure that they can treat me instantly if I have an allergic reaction to it. Last time I reacted to a drug (cipro), thank heavens I was in an outpatient surgical center hooked on an IV (being prepped for surgery). A friend of mine died a few weeks ago from an allergic reaction to an antibiotic.

And people have been marketed that there are wonder drugs out there for all sorts of ailments. I never heard of half the medical problems I can have until I listened to the commercials explaining why I need to take their drugs. So blame the drug companies for needing the huge profits to push commercials on the public, doctors for submitting to patients who come in and ask for those drugs, and the public for being gullible enough to allow marketing to dictate their medical needs.

And of course there are always the people who just want to be high.

My father died of a Hydrocodone overdose in July of this year. I don't blame drug companies but I do hold his Dr. Highly accountable...and of course, at the end of the day, it was my father that took too many pills.

His Dr. is a backwoods piece of . Sorry to be so blunt but he is. If he had shown up at my Dad's funeral, he would have been escorted out. Although there is nothing 'technically' wrong that he did, his lack of doing ANYTHING for so long is what helped lead to my father's overdose. My Dad was an alcoholic, the Dr. Would tell him he was only 'alcohol dependent' and kept prescribing meds. When Dad fell onto a concrete porch, spent a week in Neurological ICU, couldn't name objects and had lost his ability to manage the concept of time, the Dr. released him from the nursing home and sent him home with my mother that was physically unable to manage him. When Dad asked for his license back, the Dr. signed off on it. Dad could go to the liquor store again. And when he spiraled out of control on alcohol and prescription meds, when given the chance to have dad admitted to the pysch ward at the hospital, he wouldn't. A week later, Dad was dead.

But in the end, my Dad is solely responsible for his addiction. He was offered help so many times I lost count. He was given so many chances to get clean. We had him arrested and taken to detox centers only for them to send him back home because of the brain injury. We had him arrested and sent to pysch hospitals so we could force a CT scan of his head to see if he had bleeding on his brain, but they wouldn't keep him because he was drunk. The demon of addiction had taken over my dad and he couldn't see anything else except his alcohol and drugs.

So, after being kicked out of his home of 30 years (my Mom had to have a personal protection order put in place to get him out) my Dad, once a well-respected member of his church and community, died of an overdose of Hydrocodone, alone in a cheap motel room.

Drug addiction is a POWERFUL thing. It's awful and there is plenty of 'blame' to go around. The drug companies, the Dr.'s, the patients are all cogs in the wheel.

As someone who is dependent on pharmaceuticals in order to function, I am grateful to the companies who are so often vilified for continuing to formulate drugs that work for 99% of the people who take them.

I'm not on here very much anymore so let me clarify. I have Multiple Sclerosis. It's a really disease. Thankfully the symptoms I have are quite "mild" for MS, but without taking minimum 15, up to 23 pills/day (depending on the levels of pain) I would not be a functioning and productive person. With the pills I am working 9-13 hours/day doing IT, marketing and administrative/front desk duties in one job.

I'm not on any "treatment" for the disease because I am intolerant of all of them - tried 'em and was considering how many weeks/months I could keep working until I stopped each one. These treatments cost between $50,000 - $100,000/year (without insurance/assistance). Thankfully, these demonized drug companies do offer assistance for people to be able to afford to take these drugs. The treatments don't work for me but I am the anomaly. These same drug companies that already have a corner on the market are still developing new drugs to improve the success rates. They already have made pill forms of treatment instead of only injectible. BIG news!

Pharm. companies are developing drugs that help people. When they are misused and their labels with the interactions are ignored you cannot blame the drug companies!

I can tell you, too, that both of my doctors (primary care & neurologist) that prescribe drugs look up and check drug interactions every time they do a new 'scrip. No matter how typical the drug is, they both check. My pharmacy's computer (at a grocery store) checks the interactions as well, and if there is a potential severe reaction they will check with my doctor before filling the new prescription.

People are people. People are hypochondriacs in large part. Tell them of a new disease with a cure in a pill and they will want it. It is up to the doctors to test for the disease, keep up to date on the new drugs, and prescribe them only when appropriate! They aren't your friends, they are your doctor. Unfortunately there are too many who will prescribe something whenever asked. They should lose their licenses.

But once the pills are in the hands of a person neither the drug co. nor the doctor has control of it. They can tell you not to drink excessively with it but they can't make you. They can tell you not to take more than prescribed but they can't make you.

And there are always going to be those horrible bad reactions that cannot be predicted. Amy's case, knowing that she's allergic to most antibiotics, is rare. Usually you don't know that you'll have a bad reaction.

Consider how many people take a prescription medication at any given time, then over the course of a full year. How many hundreds of millions are helped by these prescription drugs. 40,000 deaths? Not bad odds.

My brother takes way more drugs than I would like to see him taking, and he had a good friend who died of an accidental overdose this summer. It's a hard thing to fight, though.

This horrifies me. I don't keep any drugs around, but I know plenty of people who do. In my daughters school (High school) kids are bored so they do drugs. (There's plenty to do around here) the first things they experiment with are their parents prescriptions kept right there in the medicine cabinet.

How many parents have taken Tylenol 3? LOADS. It is readily prescribed by the dentist and ER for any minor incident. How many people take it past the first day or two? Not many. Normally my pain goes away without my ever needing Tylenol 3, so I don't fill the prescription at all. Many people hang onto it, for "just in case" situations.

How many kids develop a codeine addiction from tylenol 3? Many. Codeine is highly addictive, but many people do not know this. I blame them for their children's addiction in that case. Why allow a medication to sit in front of a child, and not know what it can do to them? Children are given parents for a reason. They are smart, sure, but most kids see themselves as immortal, and will try just about anything.

Parents that keep prescription meds within their childrens reach and access are responsible for what happens next. My daughter came home last year asking me what "Oxy" was.(Oxycontin) You can imagine my shock. She told me that a kid offered her one for 5 dollars, and said "Well, mom, you won't let me spend 2 dollars on a "Monster" drink, I wasn't spending 5 on some little pill!" Thanks God she has that attitude, because that kid could have taken my daughters 5 dollars AND her life. (And yes, I did rat him out, seems he offered it to the entire freshman class and several parents had called. He spent some quality time at home and required counseling)

So, While it's easy to put blame just about anywhere, it's irresponsible parenting that really burns my behind.

Here's a shocker. Tylenol (in whatever form) is one of the most likely drugs for high-school kids to die from overusing. No, not the codeine. The acetaminophen. The allowable maximum dose is just a little above the normal dose, and it causes liver failure. Lots of "drama queens" teenagers who have taken an overdose of Tylenol in a fake suicide attempt for attention end up succeeding, but only slowly, after a lot of misery.

You know codeine wasn't prescription when I was a child? You could get anti-diarrhea drugs with paragoric, which was codeine.

But that doesn't mean they don't take them. Many truck drivers take uppers to stay awake.

Actually, no. That might have been true 40 years ago; it's extremely rare today, since drivers know that they can be tested at any time, even at DOT weigh stations, and definitely after any reportable accident (which means any injury or any vehicle having to be towed from the scene). Just as an example, one of our drivers had a drunk young lady run into the back of his truck as he was sitting at a stop light. Since her car had to be towed from the scene, he had to go and take a drug test.

Truckers can't be insulin dependent, unless they've been stable for two years. They have to report any heart pressure medication, and if they're taking it, they can only get a medical card for one year, instead of two.

Randomized tests have shown that if you sample truck drivers and car drivers, the rate of drug and alcohol positives in the truck drivers is way below that of car drivers, so low as to be difficult to find.

That's good to know. I've found most truck drivers are pretty darn awesome. I often let them pull in front of me if they are trying to change lanes. I'm never in such a hurry that I can't be courteous.

My nephew is a truck driver and goes to the US every week and I have often worried whether he was using pills to stay awake so it's good to hear that is no longer true.

But truckers do use lots and lots of caffeine . My cousin is a trucker and he must drink a gallon of coffee a day. But that's not rare at all, no matter what people do for a job.

I'm a stay at home mommy, I have a small business I run out of my home. I drink megatons of coffee.

Ha, yeah, probably the two most used drugs in the U.S. are caffeine and nicotine. After that, alcohol.

You're right. I guess I'm happy to just have the one vice.

I think it's important to remember that any number of celebrities (Elvis Presley comes to mind) have died of prescription drugs that were prescribed by just one doctor, and not a number of doctors.

There has been talk of putting your medical info on one card, so anyone can scan it and see if there are any conflicts. I'm not holding my breath.

That is being done where I live. I tried to look up info on it, but do not know what the "program" is called. I was at the Dr few years ago and the nurse asked me about any prescription drugs I was currently taking. Then she proceeded to go on the computer and get a print-out that showed I had been prescribed an antibiotic for a sinus infection from another Dr earlier that year. I asked was that something new to know what prescription drugs people were taking and she explained that it was. It was a list that would go back I believe she said 2 years from all of the prescriptions you had been prescribed.

In my local pharmacy, they do this for you. They have all the medications you're on in their computer (the meds they have filled for you) and the computer does a cross check to see if you can take the meds together.

I think it's a great idea. This is why when you go to a hospital they tell you to bring in your medications or at least a list of them. Having been an EMT for 15 years, and having worked in a dr's office for a while, this is SO valuable.

If people want to take them, they'll find a way. My cousin was dependent on Oxycodone and was so deep into things that she was shooting it like heroine or snorting it like cocaine. She would buy from the street dealer, or, after she got a job at a PHARMACY (???!?!?!?!?!) she started making her own Rxs for it. She overdosed at the age of 23, leaving her 2-year old son behind. It started with a legitimate prescription.

My sister-in-law was dependent on all kinds of various Rx pills, until my brother moved her and the kids further away. For some reason, she never tried Meth, which was the only drug she could easily get a hold of in their new location. The circumstances of her death were kept from me, but what I've been able to glean is that her spleen burst. She was 26, leaving my brother and their three children behind.

Prescription drugs are no joke. Take them how they're prescribed and ONLY how they're prescribed and you might not get hooked.

Regulating them further isn't going to make it harder for addicts to get a hold of the drug so much as increase the street cost and rate of theft (or worse) of those who get legitimate prescriptions.

I had oral surgery when I was 15, and my mom and I had to not only HIDE my Vicodin, but be careful to not even mention that I had any. My SIL would have found a way to get them from me if she had known.

My pharmacy does this as well. They take a picture of me, put it on the top of the page that shows all my prescriptions including a picture of the pill, print a copy for me to carry in my purse. They make an appointment to update the file once per year and re-print the file for me. The last time I went to emergency and they asked what drugs I took and what dosage, I just had to hand them the sheet of paper. They said they wished all drug stores would do that.

I'm not sure if all pharmacies are now connected to check on what folks are getting from other pharmacies but I do believe it is coming.

That would be wonderful!

My pharmacy has the information for the pills I'm filling with them (which is everything for me) and do the cross checks every time. I have to verify DOB every time I pick up anything, but not photo ID yet. With a couple of the ones I do get I'm surprised they don't require it.

Obviously if they were all linked it would cut way down on people filling multiple 'scrips at different pharms, but then we (the consumer) wouldn't have as much incentive to stick with one place.

Thinking more about this topic and who is at fault... I really believe that 97% of the time it is the person who takes the meds in an ill-advised fashion (i.e. too many, with alcohol, without prescription to get high) who is to blame. Probably 2% can be blamed on doctors who write scrips that they shouldn't (i.e. to known addicts, or too many). The other 1% (probably high) being those who have a severe allergic/adverse reaction that couldn't possibly be predicted by any human being and really can't be "blamed" on anyone unless you want to blame God (or whatever higher power).

This is so true. And so sad. I have seen several of these cases come through ER at work. The younger ones bounce back some what but the mid aged older people spend time in the ICU.