6 Facts About Opiate Addiction in the United States

When people think about addiction, they often think about alcohol addiction or problems people have with illegal substances. Many people believe that if they have been prescribed something from a physician, they cannot become addicted. Some people who suffer from chronic pain do not realize that they have become addicted to the pain medication. Some people assume that they know what a “drug addict” looks like and think that real addiction has to include heroin or some seedy parts of town. The problem is that opiate addiction is running rampant through the United States. In 2015, there were more than 50,000 deaths from drug overdoes. At least 21,000 of those deaths were from prescription pain medication overdoses. The difficulty many people have getting off of these kinds of drugs is one reason that so many are seeking out ibogaine treatment for opiate addiction. Here are some other facts about opiate abuse:

1. People who overdose are getting their drugs from their doctor. There is a sense out in the country that people are stealing vast quantities of medications from pharmacies and that is how they are getting access to the opiate drugs. The truth is much more complicated. Research shows that most overdoses that involve legal, prescription pain pills are from legally obtained prescriptions. As many as 75% of all of people who use these drugs are able to get them from someone they know such as a member of their family or a friend.
2. The bulk of the prescriptions are being written by only 20% of the doctors in the country. This small number of prescribers are responsible for more than 80% of the prescriptions for pain medications. To combat this, many states and even the federal government are cracking down on what doctors can legally prescribe these medications. Most painkillers are prescribed by primary care physicians or family doctors. Only a small fraction of these prescriptions come from more specialists.
3. People who are on Medicaid are more likely to be prescribed pain drugs than others. States with more drug overdoses began looking into who was receiving these prescriptions. In 2008, West Virginia and New Mexico had some of the highest overdose rates in the country. When researchers looked into who was getting these prescriptions, they found that Medicaid recipients were more than twice as likely to be given these drugs than people with private insurance.
4. In 2013, there were more the 207 million prescriptions for narcotic pain medicine written in the United States. Research shows that 4.2 million people around the country who have tried heroin during their lives. Experts say that, even after just one use, about 23% will become addicted to the substance. In some areas, such as Connecticut, there are people who have turned to heroin after having trouble finding Vicodin or Percocet.
5. The number of Americans who were killed by the use of medications used for pain has skyrocketed by at least 300% between 1999 and 2008. The number of people who die from overdoses of prescription pain medications is more than both deaths from heroin and cocaine.
6. More than 475,000 people went to emergency departments around the country in 2009 because of prescription drug abuse. This was double the number of people who did this in 2005. This is a clear sign of how use of these drugs is exploding.

Drug treatment can be a scary experience. Ibogaine treatment for opiate addiction can be effective at helping people with a variety of problems ranging from oxycodone addiction or oxycontin addiction to non-narcotic prescription issues such as Adderall addiction. Ibogaine treatment for opiate addiction is different from other kinds of drug treatments in that it resets the chemistry of the brain to a point before it was ever exposed to drugs or alcohol. People who go through an ibogaine treatment for opiate addiction are also able to avoid the withdrawal symptoms that prevent many from even trying to quit using. Unlike some other treatments for drugs, such as heroin, people who undergo an ibogaine treatment program, do not have to take it after their treatment ends. This makes it preferable to treatments such as methadone or suboxone, which really just substitute one addiction for another.