Prescription Drug Overdoses Up 65 Percent

Are prescription drug overdoses on the rise? According to a report released by Reuters Health on April 6, the number of annual U.S. hospital admissions due to poisoning by prescription opioids, sedatives and tranquilizers rose from about 43,000 to 71,000 between 1999 and 2006, respectively. This 65 percent increase is nearly double the amount observed in admissions due to the poisoning by other drugs and medications.

According to Dr. Jeffrey Coben of West Virginia University School of Medicine, most Americans see the headlines related to stars such as Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, and Anna Nicole Smith and think that such tragedies pertain only to Hollywood. Coben and his colleagues who performed the study, said this assumption was to the contrary. The reality is research across the country is seeing “very significant increases in serious overdoses associated with prescription drugs.”

The most predominant prescription drugs associated with these overdoses are opioids, such as morphine, methadone, Oxycontin and the active ingredient in Percocet. These powerful narcotic painkillers have been found to be habit-forming. Also, sedatives or tranquilizers such as Valium, Xanax, and Ativan are the reason for the increase in admissions.

When asked why there has been such a rise in poisoning by prescription drugs, Coben and his team noted that there wasn’t any single cause. But rather a number of variations such as the increase in availability of powerful prescription drugs, as well as the attitude toward the use, or abuse, of prescription drugs tends to be different than ones toward using other drugs. This is especially true among young people, who say that prescription drugs are easy to obtain and they see them as less addictive and less dangerous than street drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

However, the rate of accidental, or unintentional, poising by opioids, sedatives and tranquilizers nearly doubled during the seven year study period. With unintentional poisoning now the second-leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States.

The study, which was published in the April 2010 issue of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, also found that urban, middle-aged women seem especially vulnerable to prescription drug overdoses. And that hospitalizations for methadone poisoning increased more than any other drug during the seven-year period.