Avoid Prescription Drug Abuse: "Take Two Tylenol and Call Me in the Morning"

Have you ever heard the saying "Take two Tylenol and call me in the morning"? Everyone I know use to say it as a joke but not anymore. Doctors are now telling their patients more and more often to take two Tylenol and the pain will be better. The sad fact is that it is not just doctors but dentist and other health care professionals that are refusing to write any form of narcotic prescriptions.

I can understand their hesitancy to write a prescription that can become habit forming and has a great potential for misuse. There are many people who overdose on prescription pain killers and there are even more out there that are abusing them. But what about the rest of us who actually have serious medical conditions that require narcotic pain killers. Hospitals are posting signs saying they do not write prescriptions for narcotics. Dentists will not even write you a prescription for Tylenol #3 whenever you have a tooth pulled. Some of us live in pain everyday just because our local hospital or doctor absolutely refuses to write narcotic prescriptions. I have found it exceedingly frustrating to get my medication. The only place I have found to even take me seriously is a pain clinic and then I had to have a referral from my doctor before they would even accept me as a patient.

The sad truth is that many people are getting narcotic prescriptions that do not need them. They may have to travel out of state to receive these prescriptions but they are obtaining them all the same. These people abuse there medications or even worse they sell them for a profit. These few individuals who take it upon themselves to become addicts and pill pushers are hurting the rest of the population who need narcotics just so they can live a normal life. I can't lay the blame completely on the health care providers who won't write the prescriptions or the addicts who abuse their medications. A lot of the blame should go to the drug manufacturers.

We live in a society where new ideas, new concepts are conceived every day. Why is it that the drug manufacturers can not seem to make a narcotic that can not be abused? They have succeeded in many ways: time release capsules replacing tablets, special coatings on tablets that make the pill useless once crushed. They are even marketing a tablet form of narcotics that once crushed and snorted turns to gel as soon as it encounters nasal mucus. So why not make all narcotics this way? That would seem to solve the prescription drug abuse problem. There is one flaw in this solution. The drug manufacturers don't seem too concerned in mass producing prescription narcotics that can not be abused. Is there a hidden agenda with the outcome just being how much money they can make and not the concern of the public. With all the medication recalls it makes you wonder whether the manufacturers are just being overly cautious about bringing out a new non-abusable narcotic or whether they are more concerned about their profits.