THEY SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER
Prescription Drug Abuse
This excellent article in the Baltimore Sun helps puts the face of drug addiction where it is more frequently found these days – upon individuals who manifest themselves as successful and educated.
Two pharmacologists – one is dead because of drug abuse and the other’s life is ruined. If this degree of devastation can happen to people who should know better, even by virtue of the fact that they are trained on what this stuff does, then what hope is there for the general population?
Addiction overwhelms intellect and common sense. With drugs so readily available we are simply going to ruin more people and render them useless for society.
Drug addiction treatment can help some, but there simply is not enough accessibility.
Drug education can help.
In the long run, it will take an ethics overhaul in the pharmaceutical industry.
“Eight months after his fiancee died in Baltimore after injecting bogus drugs, former University of Maryland pharmacologist Clinton B. McCracken has ended his silence, calling his substance abuse “a cautionary tale regarding the extreme dangers of intellectualizing drug use.”
McCracken, writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, says he thought he was smart enough to keep a handle on his drug use — for example, by limiting his use of opioids like OxyContin to no more than two consecutive days every few months.
But “the perception of control is really nothing more than illusion,” he writes, and such misplaced confidence “produces blindness to the devastating consequences of drug abuse and addiction.”
His personal essay appears as the 33-year-old scientist remains in Baltimore following his March guilty plea to growing marijuana, a felony. Under a plea deal, he was given a suspended five-year sentence that spared him jail time but meant he would likely be deported to his native Canada.”