Illicit Drugs on Campus Are Increasingly the Rx Variety
July 12th, 2010 admin
Topics:
Here’s something that frankly, disturbed me. My daughter, who just finished her freshman year in college, recently told me, “I can’t believe how many kids at school take prescription drugs on a regular basis. They take Adderall to help them study, Ambien to get to sleep and Xanax to calm down.” It surprised me that at 18 she even knew all the names of these drugs. Had she said that her fellow students were using marijuana or even ecstasy I wouldn’t have been as shocked. Those are the kinds of drugs you expect to find–along with copious amounts of alcohol–on college campuses. But this sounded like prescription pills were freely available—prescribed to students with attention-deficit diagnoses or some other mental health problem, (or swiped from …
Related Posts
Higher spending on flu drugs related to H1N1 built on a base of increasing use of prescription drugs in children due to obesity, diabetes and other health issues.
Read More →
The value of using antidepressants to treat mild to moderate depression came under fire recently after a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the drugs didn’t work much better than a placebo in those with mild to moderate depression. These findings were widely reported because with 164 million prescriptions written...
The U.S. Centers for Medicare and medicaid services said on Wednesday it is reviewing its coverage of anemia drugs used to treat patients with kidney disease. [Original News Article] Related NewsGuidelines On Anemia Drugs Undermine Doctors’ Ability To Treat Patients, Say DoctorsAnemia warning backs MedicareMedicare to reduce U.S. payments for...
Many college health-insurance plans fail to provide students with minimum coverage and often pay out far less in benefits than they collect in premiums, New York State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo says. Plans with low coverage limits, numerous exclusions and high premiums “leave students at risk while providing massive profits for insurance...
If the new federal law equalizing coverage for mental conditions with that for medical-surgical care works as hoped, there may no longer be a need for a public system to handle mental health in the long run, says Michael Hogan , New York state’s mental health commissioner. Under so-called mental health parity , which was passed well before...
Children have become the new growth industry for prescription drug makers. A study released last month by the pharmacy benefit manager Medco found that 26% of kids under 19—almost 30% of those aged 10 to 19—are now taking prescription medications for a chronic condition. Meanwhile, spending on prescription drugs for children increased by almost...
There have long been safety questions — and lawsuits — over whether bone-building drugs like Merck’s Fosamax can actually increase the chance of femur fractures. Today, the FDA said it was going to take another look at the safety issues. In a posting on its Web site, the FDA said a 2008 examination of data from makers of osteoporosis...
Safety experts advising the FDA have been sending up flares about various asthma drugs for several years. In 2007 , a panel said GlaxoSmithKline’s Serevent and Advair should carry a warning about risks to children. In 2008 , experts said Serevent and Norvartis’s Foradil shouldn’t be used for asthma any more. Today, the FDA itself said...
I have occasionally used the sad stories of Jack Rosser and Albert Baxter, both of whom were denied cancer drugs by Britain’s socialized medical system, to illustrate the cruel and arbitrary rationing methods utilized by all government-run health care systems. For those of you who think that such horrors could never be inflicted on Americans,...
Is the bar set too high for weight loss drugs?
Read More →
Related Tweets from Twitter
Related News from Digg
Leave a comment
| Trackback
