Drug Abuse: Meth’s Pollution Epidemic

Prescription drug abuse: insight into the epidemic.

The emergence of clinically efficacious prescription drugs to treat pain, anxiety, and learning disorders is accompanied by the potential for nonmedical use. Prescription drug abuse has become a modern-day epidemic in the United States and is now second only to marijuana use across all age groups. This article reviews the various data collection, analysis, and reporting systems that have been d...

Drug pollution--the problem of abuse.

Drug abuse among nurses: A neglected challenge

Drug dependence is a prominent issue in individuals of different professions, education levels, and socioeconomic classes. Authors of this paper, including the first author (as a qualified clinical nurse and nursing supervisor), aimed to address the challenges associated with substance abuse and the subsequent failure in interactions between healthcare personnel and patients referring to clinic...

Prescription drug abuse & addiction: past, present and future: the paradigm for an epidemic.

Prescription drug abuse has reached epidemic proportions in the United States and West Virginia is not immune. It is estimated that in 2009, the number of adolescents and adults with a substance abuse and/or dependence problem has reached 23.2 million in the US. There has been an alarming rate of increased sales of methadone, hydrocodone and oxycodone. This article addresses the scope of the pr...

The Effects of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs on the Opioid Abuse Epidemic

Opioid abuse is currently the most significant public health problem in the US. Many US states implemented prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) in response. In this paper, I use a new micro-level medical claims database and I exploit state-level and time-series variations in PDMP implementation to shed light on the impacts of these programs. My results show that PDMPs lead to an overal...