Psychiatrists Cause Teen Drug Use

It used to be that the easiest way to decrease the supply of drug was to legalize them.  That trend is changing:

A growing number of teenagers say it's easier to illegally obtain prescription drugs than to buy beer, according to a survey published today.

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University asked: "Which is easiest for someone your age to buy: cigarettes, beer, marijuana, or prescription drugs such as OxyContin, Percocet, Vicodin or Ritalin, without a prescription?" Nineteen percent of teenagers found it easier to purchase prescription drugs than cigarettes, beer or marijuana, compared with 13 percent a year ago. A quarter of the teens said it is easiest to buy marijuana, with 43 percent of 17-year-olds saying they could buy the drug in less than an hour.

There is no conundrum.  There's a reason prescription drugs pills are easy to obtain: They are everywhere.

The mental health field has always recognized biological imbalances that lead to serious mental problems.  Bipolar disease and schizophrenia have been treated with medication for years.  A recent trend, however, classifies every woe as a disease.  And how do we treat diseases? With drugs, of course.

Your boyfriend broke up with you?  Learning to deal with the tragedies of life is not part of growing up.  You suffer from depression.  Pop a Prozac. 

Your teenage boy is angsty and aggressive?  It couldn't be that this is a normal part of aging.  He suffers from attention deficient disorder.  Give that young man a Ritalin!

Your daughter has trouble making new friends?  She is not shy or reserved.  She doesn't need to simply get out more.  Give her a Xanax!

And the adults are the worst of them all.  A Beverly Hills housewife's drug supply would make Tony Montana blush.

Pills, pills, pills.  Everywhere there are pills.

Pharmaceutical companies are making billions, and psychiatrists are willing accomplishes to this fraud on the American people.

How do we make it harder for children to obtain prescription drugs?  Simple. We tell modern psychiatry to stop classifying every unpleasant part of the human experience as a disease.

Comments

[Evika]

Teachers tell parents to go get a diagnosis. Then doctors tell parents that refusing to put a child on drugs is a form of child abuse, and mock any parent who dares question or challenge the conclusion.

[Windypundit]

And if you want more muscle, don't hit the weight room. Just take steroids!

Whether you call it a disease or a condition or normal human variation, if there's a pill that makes you more like you want to be, where's the harm?

[Mike]

Windypundit: I'm all for adults using drugs. When kids are getting drugs from classmates, though, there might be a problem.

[Aaron]

Kids get them from their classmates, who get them from their parents.

A situation, not at all atypical, is "Mom twists her ankle, goes to the doctor, and gets some Percocet. Dad has a root canal, goes to the dentist, and gets Vicodin. They take some over the next day or two, feel better, and leave the rest in a bottle in the medicine cabinet. Junior spots them and realizes that the 40 or so pills left over will fetch him an easy $100 or so at school. Or Junior's friend spots them and steals them. Or Junior and his friend take them recreationally for a while. (And Grandma? She has a closet full of Oxycodone and Ativan that she dutifully refills whether or not she has used up the last bottle....)"

People don't take SSRI's as recreational drugs, as they don't work that way. Any doctor prescribing Xanax for a long-term anxiety disorder, let alone to a minor with an anxiety disorder, isn't very competent.

[Anne]

Why are there so many "diseases?" Because insurance won't pay to help a condition without a label.