14 DAY TRIAL // Legal drugs are the second most prevalent cause of accidental death in the United States, after involuntary car crashes, according to a new study conducted by government researchers who released a statement on Tuesday. In West Virginia, prescription painkillers account for more overdoses and deaths than drugs, even though people rarely have prescriptions for the drugs that kill them. These statistics contribute to the national ones, which currently look very frightening, with accidental overdoses and suicides spiking through the roof.
"Now in the United States, drug overdoses are the second-leading cause of unintended deaths behind motor vehicle deaths. Use and abuse of prescription and particularly narcotic pain medications have increased dramatically in the last 10 to 15 years,” explains Aron Hall, a scientist from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), during an interview with colleague Leonard Paulozzi.
The find will be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Hall says that responsible for such a large number of deaths is the fact that more and more medications, usually sold with prescription, are now sold for off-label use, meaning that they are expected to cure conditions for which they were not tested.
"We were aware that prescription drugs were the primary culprits in many of these deaths, but we did not know whether individuals had prescriptions for the drugs that ultimately killed them," Hall says. Paullozzi adds that "Taken as directed, the drugs are safe. But they are powerful drugs and they are not something to be taken recreationally at parties and that sort of thing."
The researchers draw attention to the fact that some people who acquire the drugs on prescription sell them to others for profit, fueling this worrying trend. Plus, they deprive themselves of the correct drug doses they should be taking, which in the long run affects everyone. Hall and Paullozzi say that it's up to the doctors to better control the drugs they prescribe, so as to avoid this kind of situations from spreading even further.